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LECTURES 



TO 



AMERICAN AUDIENCES. 



BY 

EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D., 

Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. 



I. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE 

HOMES. 

II. THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF GENERAL 

EUROPEAN HISTORY. 













^ CV„ 






PHILADELPHIA : 

PORTER & COATES 






THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON ! 



Copyright, 

By PORTER & COATES, 

18S2. 



PREFACE. 



These two series of Lectures were read in several 
American cities in the course of the autumn and winter 
of 1881-1882. The .first course was read before the 
Lowell Institute at Boston and the Peabody Institute 
at Baltimore, and, in a condensed shape, at New York. 
The second course was read at Ithaca, New Haven, and 
Philadelphia, and some parts of the last lecture were 
read at several other places. Each course was meant to 
have a distinct character of its own. The first was meant 
to be of a more popular kind ; the second, intended 
originally for the members of Cornell University, was 
meant to have more of an academic character. But I 
was both surprised and pleased to find it appreciated 
as it was by large and more general audiences, both at 
Ithaca and elsewhere. 

Each course has a distinct subject of its own, and 
forms a whole by itself. But as the two subjects to a 
certain extent overlap, some matters will be found dealt 
with in both. Still, as they come in naturally in both 



m 



iv PREFACE. 

courses, and as they are looked at from different points 
and dealt with on different scales, I saw no reason to cut 
out any part of either course because some of the same 
general thoughts and statements were to be found in the 
other also. 

In reading the lectures in different places, some mat- 
ter of a specially local character was necessarily left 
out and put in at each. Things for instance which had 
a special fitness at Boston had no special fitness at Bal- 
timore. In revising the lectures for the press, I have 
for the most part kept such local references as belonged 
specially to New England. In the first series there are 
naturally a good many of these, and that from two 
causes. The lectures were written first of all for de- 
livery at Boston ; and it will be further easy to see that, 
for the particular purpose which I had in hand, the name, 
the institutions, and the history of New England supplied 
me with much that specially suited my object. 

In some parts of the second course, especially in the 
last lecture, I have got upon questions of modern poli- 
tics, though not on the immediate politics either of the 
United States or of Great Britain. The last lecture, it 
will be seen, is of unusual length. The whole of it was 
not delivered in any one place; but parts of it were 
read and spoken in different places. It was first written 
in November 1881, when the resistance of the South- 
Dalmatian highlands to Austrian oppression had not very 



PREFACE. V 

long begun. This struggle, it must be remembered, 
began before the revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
which arose out of it, and which drew to itself much 
more general attention. Of the later stages of the strug- 
gle it is very hard to say anything. For the Austrian 
government, by arresting and expelling Mr. Evans and 
forbidding Mr. Stillman to enter the country, has thor- 
oughly succeeded in its attempt to hinder all truthful 
reports from reaching any Western land. But there is, 
I believe, no doubt that the Austrian troops have occu- 
pied Crivoscia, but that, in so doing, they have simply 
occupied a desert. The whole population, men, women, 
and children, rather than submit to foreign tyranny, have 
left their homes, and here taken shelter with their free 
fellow-countrymen in Montenegro. Francis Joseph now 
reigns in Crivoscia as Xerxes once reigned in Athens. 
May the possession of the one despot be as short-lived 
as that of the other. 

The United States, as far as my experience goes, con- 
tain no native partisan of either Turk or Austrian. That 
such is the case forms one of the many ties which bind 
me to a land to my sojourn in which I shall always look 
back as one of the brightest times of my life. I cannot 
let this little book go forth from an American press 
without expressing my deep-felt thanks for the kindness 
which I received wherever I went, from New York to 
St. Louis. But where every memory is pleasant, I can- 



vi PREFACE. 

not help picking out a few memories which are the 
pleasantest of all. While giving my best thanks to my 
American friends everywhere, I cannot help adding a 
small special tribute to my friends at Ithaca and at New 
Haven. 

SOMERLEAZE, WELLS, SOMERSET, 

July nth, 1882. 



CONTENTS. 



I. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE 

HOMES. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

Old, Middle, and New England 7 

LECTURE II. 
The English Name 38 

LECTURE III. 
The First Voyage and the Second 68 

LECTURE IV. 
The Oldest England and the Second 99 

LECTURE V. 
The English in their Second Home 135 

LECTURE VI. 

The Second Voyage and the Third Home 169 

vii 



viii CONTENTS. 

II. THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF GENE- 
RAL EUROPEAN HISTORY. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

Causes and their Effects 205 



LECTURE II. 
The Democratic City 238 



LECTURE III. 
The Aristocratic City . . . . 277 

LECTURE IV. 
The Ruling City and its Empire 311 

LECTURE V. 
The Elder and the Newer England 358 

LECTURE VI. 
Rome Transplanted 400 



THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 



IN 



ITS THREE HOMES 



THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 



IN 



ITS THREE HOMES 



LECTURE I. 

©ttr, iftlftrtrle, autr Jieto 35nglanir. 

The subject which I have chosen for the course of lec- 
tures which I am now called upon to give before you is 
not a new theme in my hands. It may almost seem rash 
on my part to choose for my first audience beyond the 
Ocean a subject on which my pen and my voice have so 
often been busy in my own hemisphere. Can I find any- 
thing new to say about the English people, their origin, 
their later history, unless I seek to say something new by 
unsaying and refuting all that I have ever said before ? 
Now I am certainly not going to seek for newness by 
that course. I do not suppose that I shall, in the course 
of these six lectures, say many things before you here 
in Boston which I have not said, and often said, either be- 
fore some gathering in my own island or in some of the 
many writings with which I have cumbered the earth. But 
change of place will, I trust, bring somewhat of newness 
with it. The same subject, dealt with on a new side of 

7 



8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Ocean, will be in some sort a new subject The things 
and persons spoken of may be the same, but they will 
put on new relations and proportions. We may speak 
of no fresh things, of no fresh persons— we may bring in 
no names that we have not often heard before ; but we 
may have to speak of some of them in such a way that 
the last may become first and the first last. The side of 
things which is most prominent when they are looked at 
from European soil may not always be the most promi- 
nent when they are looked at from American soil. When 
two great societies of men have for many ages a common 
history, and when at a certain point the common history 
parts into two distinct histories, both should alike look 
back to the common possession, both should alike cleave 
to the common possession, both should feel that it is a 
common possession and not the exclusive right of either. 
Yet the later separation, the new thoughts, the new feel- 
ings, which cannot fail to follow on that separation, 
are sure to cause the older and common possession 
to be looked on with somewhat different eyes by those 
who, from the point of parting have walked in one direc- 
tion, and by those who have walked in another. 

I stand before you this day as a member of one great 
community, addressing members of another great com- 
munity, both of which communities have an equal right 
in such a common possession as I speak of. And that 
common possession is no mean one. It is no other than 
the history, the tongue, the laws, the freedom, of the 
English folk, from the first moment when history or 
legend gives us any glimpses of the English folk in any 
of the homes which they have made their own. In these 
later times those homes have become many ; but in the 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 9 

long course of the history with which we have to deal 
there are some, there are three, which stand forth con- 
spicuous above all others. The title which I have chosen 
for our subject of these evenings is " The English People 
in its Three Homes." I trust that there is no one here 
who will not take my words as they are meant to be 
taken — I trust that there is no one who will not welcome 
me as I ask to be welcomed — when I say that of these 
three homes I am now standing in the latest and the 
vastest. I have more than once said, sportively yet in 
all seriousness, that what I have to speak of is Old, 
Middle, and New England. That, here in Boston, I am 
standing on the soil of New England I need not go about 
to prove. But I would ask, even in Boston, to be allowed 
to use that familiar name in a somewhat wider sense than 
that which it technically bears. I think that the New Eng- 
land of the seventeenth century, the New England of the 
eighteenth, can afford to allow me, for the nonce at least, 
to extend its name to all the independent English-speak- 
ing lands on its own side of Ocean. The New England 
of which I have to speak — of which I have to speak in 
its relations to two older Englands — can acknowledge no 
bounds narrower than those of the United States of 
America. 

Now New England, by its very name, implies an older 
England. And the older England which that name im- 
plies is the England which is my own home and birth- 
place. And it is of the ties which bind this newer 
England to that older one, that older England to this 
newer one, that I have now mainly to speak before you. 
I have to speak of all things, past and present, which 
can set forth those two great communities, older and 
younger, as alike members of one yet greater whole. 



10 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

I have to set forth whatever can serve to draw together 
the two communities and those who form them — what- 
ever can serve to draw the greater child to its elder 
parent, the elder parent to its greater child. I have to 
enlarge on all that can draw together those whom geo- 
graphical position, whom historical destiny, has parted 
asunder into two distinct political societies, but who 
ought still to deem themselves one, as brethren in a high- 
er brotherhood, born of one ancient stock, speaking one 
ancient tongue, sharers under different forms in one an- 
cient freedom — a freedom that was struggled for and won 
by the common forefathers of both. All this is part of 
my subject, its highest and worthiest part. But it is not 
the whole of my subject ; it is not, in historical order, its 
earliest part. If I ask you in this newer England to look 
back to the older, I have to ask that older England in its 
turn to look back in the like sort. If I call on you here 
in this newer England to look to the rock from whence 
you were hewn and to the hole of the pit whence you 
were digged, I have to preach the same lesson to the men 
of my own older England also. If I ask you to look to 
the land which is truly your motherland, I must ask both 
you and the men of the motherland herself to look to 
the land which is truly the motherland of the mother. 
Mark that, while I have spoken of your land as the 
New England, I have not ventured to speak of my 
own land as the Old. I have spoken of an older and 
a newer England, but I hav? not ventured to speak of 
that older England as Old England. For the true his- 
tory of our race, the true history of our own branch 
of that race, will never be fully taken in unless we ever 
bear in mind that, beyond that England which with most 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. II 

of us passes for Old England, there is an older England 
still. 

You will bear with me while I speak of your newer 
England as the child and colony of my older England, 
if I speak of my own older England as itself the child 
and colony of that oldest England of all. That oldest 
England sent forth her sons to the shores of the isle of 
Britain, as in after-times the isle of Britain sent forth her 
sons to the vaster mainland of America. In the general 
history of our race, as part of the general history of the 
world, while I call on you — not only here in Massachu- 
setts and her immediate neighbours, but through the 
whole length and breadth of your vast Union — to look 
on yourselves as men of a New England, I cannot claim 
the name of Old England for the land which I ask you 
to look on as a motherland and to look on her sons as 
brethren. The island from which I come, the island from 
which your fathers came, is, in the general history of our 
folk, not Old England, but only Middle England. For 
Old England in the strictest sense, for the oldest Eng- 
land of all, for the first land in which we know that men 
bore the English name and spoke the English tongue, 
you must, when you have crossed the Ocean to come to 
us, again cross that narrower arm of Ocean which parts 
the great Teutonic island from the older Teutonic main- 
land. In the true historic map of the English folk, be- 
tween the Old England on the mainland of Europe and 
the New England on the mainland of America, lies that 
England which is the child of the one, the parent of the 
other, the Middle England in the isle of Britain. You 
are well pleased, and rightly pleased, to tell the tale how 
your fathers came from the isle of Britain to plant the 



12 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

first germs of the mighty fabric of this New England 
on American soil. And so we of the Middle England 
must not forget, and along with us you of the New 
England must not forget either, how our forefathers, 
your remoter forefathers, came in the like sort from the 
continent of Europe, from the oldest England of all, to 
plant the germs of the Middle England, and thereby of 
the New England also, upon the conquered shores of 
Britain. We must go back together to those early days 
of our race when 

" From the east hither 
Angles and Saxons 
Up became. 
Over broad sea 
Britain they sought." 

And we must remember that in crossing the sea, in 
seeking Britain, if they founded the great settlement of 
the English folk in our European island, they founded 
also, as a germ that was to bear fruit after many 
ages, this vaster settlement of the English folk on your 
American mainland. In founding the kingdom of Eng- 
land and all that that name implies, they founded, not in 
a figure, but as a remote father may be said to found his 
remote children, the confederation of the United States 
of America and all that that name implies. 

I can well believe that I have just now said some things 
which may to some sound startling; I have indeed purpose- 
ly thrown some things into a somewhat startling shape. I 
may have said some things already — I shall certainly 
say some things as I go on — which to some minds may 
sound doubtful, and which may seem capable of being 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 3 

met by argument. Be it so ; any old arguments I think 
I can answer ; to any new arguments I shall be ready to 
listen. But let us not have them yet. I shall come to 
the stage of disputation later. I ask leave, first of all, to 
tell my tale — if it be so, to set forth my paradox — in my 
own way, and to keep clear of disputings, and even of 
arguments, on this our first night of meeting. I trust 
that I have already made plain what I mean by my par- 
able of Old, Middle, and New England ; I trust that I 
have pointed out beyond chance of mistake where the 
three homes of the English people are to be looked for. 
We have found one England on the mainland of Europe, 
another in the isle of Britain, a third on the mainland 
of America. Let me now go on for the rest of this first 
lecture to work out this general sketch in somewhat 
more of detail. And I will ask leave to do this some- 
what positively, somewhat dogmatically. I will ask leave 
to state my own view with some confidence, taking for 
the present very little heed to the views of others. 
Let me say my own say to-night on this my first ap- 
pearing before a gathering here on the soil of the 
third England. In other lectures I may come to such 
difficulties, such objections, as I have as yet heard 
of. If any fresh difficulties or objections should be 
brought to my knowledge before I next meet you 
here, it may be hard to grapple with them at such 
short notice, but I will at least do my best. 

Let us then, before we go into any details, dis- 
puted or undisputed, take a wide and general view of 
the history of the English people. I say the Eng- 
lish people, because so to speak best sets forth what 



14 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

I have in my own mind. I cannot, with any accuracy, 
speak of the English race; that would be claiming 
for ourselves too great a place among the nations 
of the earth. The English people, in its three 
homes, is, after all, but one member of a greater fam- 
ily ; we are not a race, but only part of a race. Wider 
than the bond which binds together all the speakers of 
the English tongue, narrower than the bond which binds 
together all the nations of Aryan Christendom, comes 
the bond which binds, or should bind, together all the 
many branches of the Teutonic race. Of that race we 
are one great division, or rather, in truth, we are a 
division of a division. On the other hand, I could not, 
for my present purpose, speak, with any accuracy, of 
the English nation. For the word nation has in practice 
taken to itself a meaning which is not implied in the 
word itself, a meaning partly local, partly political. It 
commonly means that those to whom it is applied live 
under one common government; indeed it almost 
seems to imply that they occupy a continuous terri- 
tory, or, at all events, a territory whose parts do not lie 
far asunder. I think we never apply the word nation to 
people who are under different governments, unless we 
mean to imply, or at least to suggest, that they ought to 
be under one government. If I speak, as I often have 
spoken, of the Greek, the Servian, or the Bulgarian 
nation as divided among several governments, I have 
always meant to imply that that division is a wrongful 
thing, and that the whole of each of those nations ought 
to be united under one common national government. 
Now assuredly there is nothing further from the 
thoughts of any sane man on either side of Ocean 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 5 

than to wish to see all the speakers of the English 
tongue united under one common government. Some 
perhaps might even wish, without losing the character 
of sane persons, to see the number of independent 
English-speaking governments in the world greater 
than it now is. And the geographical position of the 
countless speakers of the English tongue is such that 
each creation of a fresh English-speaking government 
would be the creation of a fresh English-speaking na- 
tion. As there is now one independent English-speak- 
ing nation in Britain, another independent English- 
speaking nation in America, I know not why there 
should not be a third such in Australia, perhaps even 
a fourth in Africa. I must therefore speak of you, 
citizens of the United States, as members of an Eng- 
lish nation, as members of one English nation, while 
I am a member of another. I cannot use the word 
nation so as to take us both in. It implies a political 
and a local connexion which cannot exist between two 
independent political societies with the Ocean rolling 
between them. But, if we do not belong to the same 
nation, I do hold that we belong to the same people, or 
rather, to use a word of our own tongue, to the same 
folk. By that I mean that we come of the same stock, 
that we speak the same tongue, that we have a long 
common history and a crowd of common memories. I 
mean, in short, that we are one folk in all things except 
that local and political separation which the hand of 
nature and the facts of history have wrought. And 
these ties of blood and speech and memory surely rise 
above the lesser facts of local and political separation to 
make us feel ourselves in the highest sense one people. 



1 6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

We dwell in different quarters of the globe, but we are 
surely more to one another than dwellers in the same 
quarter of the globe who do not come of the com- 
mon stock, who do not speak the common tongue. 
Let me say that the words " foreign " and " foreigner " 
are words which should never be spoken between 
men of the English folk in Britain and men of 
the English folk in America. It grates a little on my 
ear when I see in some of your newspapers news from 
the British England set down among " news from foreign 
lands." Yet this may perhaps be borne ; the mere land 
may in a sense be called " foreign." It grated much 
more on my ear when, in an American edition of a lit- 
tle book, not of my own writing, but one in which I 
have a kind of fatherly interest, I saw its author spoken 
of as " a foreign writer." This, I must say, was too 
much. It grated even more on my ears when I heard 
myself, in a speech otherwise highly honourable to me, 
spoken of as one of a " foreign nationality." But I was 
relieved and comforted by the hearty zeal with which 
the rest of the company accepted my strong disclaimers 
of anything foreign about rae, and welcomed me as 
one of their own kin. "Foreign," "foreigner," "foreign 
nationality ;" away with such forms of words ! You are 
not foreigners; we do not look on you as foreigners, 
when you come to visit the older England in Britain. 
And I am not a foreigner, I will not deem myself a fo- 
reigner, I will not bear that you should look on me as a 
foreigner, when I come to visit this newer England in 
America. Here on your soil I am not indeed in mine 
own home, but I am none the less among mine own 
folk. I am among men of mine own blood and mine 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 17 

own tongue, sharers in all that a man of either England 
deems it his pride and happiness to share in. How can 
we be strangers and foreigners to one another, how can 
we be other than kinsfolk and brethren of the same 
hearth, when we think that your forefathers and mine 
may have sailed together from the oldest England of 
all in the keels of Hengest or of Cerdic — that they may 
have lurked together with yElfred in the marshes of 
Athelney — that they may have stood side by side in the 
thick shield-wall on the hill of Senlac — that they may 
have marched together as brethren to live and die for 
English freedom alike on the field of overthrow at 
Evesham and on the field of victory at Naseby ? 

I surely need not remind you that the whole heritage 
of the past, the history, the memories, the illustrious 
names, which belong to the earlier days of the English 
folk in Britain, are yours as well as ours. They are 
in the stricter sense your own. The men who piled 
up the mighty fabric of English law and English free- 
dom were your fathers, your brethren, no less than ours. 
In the long line of hero-kings who built up the king- 
dom of England you have as full a share as we have ; 
in building up the kingdom of England they were build- 
ing up the commonwealth of America. If yours is the 
king who lurked in Athelney, yours too is the king who 
won the fight of Brunanburh. Yours are the king who 
waged the year of battles with the Dane and the king 
who waged the day of battle with the Norman. And if 
the kings are yours as well as ours, so are the men who 
curbed the power of kings. Yours are the men who wrung 
the Great Charter from the kingly rebel ; yours are 



1 8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

the men who dictated the Provisions of Oxford and the 
men who gathered round the victor of Poitiers on the 
nobler field of the Good Parliament Your share is 
alike with ours in every blow struck on behalf of free- 
dom, from the day of Lewes to the day of Marston. 
And if we boast that we won to ourselves the men of 
other lands, if we changed the Dane and the Norman 
into Englishmen as true as if their forefathers had first 
seen the shores of Britain from the keels of Hengest, 
the work was yours as well as ours. The strangers 
whom we made specially our own, they whose names we 
rank alongside of the noblest of our native worthies, 
the men who came from the beech-clad isles of Den- 
mark, from the deep Alpine valley of Aosta, from the 
Strong Mount that guarded the land of France against 
the Norman, to become Englishmen on English soil, 
Cnut the King, Anselm the Bishop, Simon the Earl, — 
they are yours by the same law of adoption that makes 
them ours. And when the course of our history parts 
asunder, when the English people become two nations 
instead of one, if the history which you have wrought 
in America is no longer ours, if the history which we 
have wrought in Britain is no longer yours, in the same 
sense as is the common history which we wrought to- 
gether in earlier times, still, we have a common interest, 
a common fellow-feeling, the feeling which follows the 
deeds of friends and kinsfolk with a different eye from 
that with which it follows the deeds of strangers, in all 
that men of English blood have done on American soil 
since the older and the newer England parted asunder. 
And you too, I trust, have not ceased to look with the 
like feeling on all that men of English blood have done 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 1 9 

on British soil since the day when the newer England 
bade farewell to its political connexion with the elder, 
but did not, I trust, bid farewell to the far higher tie 
of a common blood, a common speech, the long glories 
of a common history. 

Let me now go back to the earliest of those deeds in which 
I have just said that your forefathers and mine may well 
have shared together. I said that they may have sailed 
together from the oldest England of all in the keels of 
Hengest or of Cerdic. What then is the difference be- 
tween us on the eastern side of Ocean and you on this 
western side ? It is simply this : that you have taken 
two great voyages, while we have taken only one. And 
the first of those voyages we assuredly took together. 
The men of New England and the men of Middle Eng- 
land assuredly started together from the shores of Old 
England. Not that we all started in one company. 
Both those great voyages were made up of many smaller 
voyages. The Englishmen who settled in Virginia and 
the Englishmen who settled in Georgia sailed with a 
considerable interval of time between their sailings. But 
both sailed on the same errand ; both set forth from the 
same island to seek for new homes on the same conti- 
nent. So it was in that more ancient voyage which led 
the forefathers of both to the island from which they 
sailed. It took a good many voyages from the oldest 
England on the European mainland before the second 
England in the isle of Britain became an English land. 
But what I say is that, in those earliest voyages of all 
we who went no further than the second England, and 
you who ages afterward pressed on to make a third 



20 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

England, had an equal share. So comparatively short 
a time has passed since the second of those great voy- 
ages that there must be many a man here who knows 
perfectly well who his forefathers were who first came 
to this third England, and from what part of the second 
England they came. So long a time has passed since 
the first of those great voyages that a man must be wise 
indeed — wise, I should think, beyond anything that is 
written — if he can profess to know from what part of 
the oldest England his forefathers came, and whether 
they made their voyage with Hengest or with Cerdic or 
with any older or later captains. My position is only that, 
though we can none of us tell exactly whence our fore- 
fathers came or under whose leadership, we can at least 
say with a very large amount of likelihood that they 
came from some part or another of a certain region 
of the European continent, and under the leadership of 
some one or other of those chiefs whose coming changed 
Britain into England. 

It is true that, for reasons of which I shall speak another 
time, it might be rash for each particular man to say this of 
his own particular forefathers. But the English people, as 
a whole, may say it with the most perfect confidence of 
the forefathers of the English people as a whole. My 
position is that those among the English people who 
shared in the second voyage, and those who did not 
share in it, all shared alike in the first voyage. The 
forefathers of those who abode in the second England 
and the forefathers of those who went on to make the 
third England alike set forth in the beginning from the 
first England of all. In some or other of the keels 
which crossed the narrower Ocean from the first Ene- 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 21 

land to the second sailed the forefathers of Washington 
and the forefathers of Chatham. Whether they sailed 
in the same keel or not the most prying genealogist can- 
not tell us. It is enough that they both sailed in some 
keel or other. What then is the history of the three 
homes of the English people ? What is the history of 
Old, Middle, and New England ? It may be summed 
up in a few words. We all set forth from a continent and 
sailed to make a new home in an island, leaving, be it 
ever remembered, a good many of our kinsfolk in the 
old home on the continent. We all stayed together in 
the island till we had pretty well forgotten from what 
parts of the continent we severally came. After a time, 
while some of us stayed in our second home, some of 
us sailed forth yet again from the island to make a third 
home in another continent. Or shall I put it more 
briefly? We all took one voyage from the mainland 
of Europe to the isle of Britain. Some of us abode in 
that isle, while others took a second voyage from the 
isle of Britain to the mainland of America. Or shall I 
put it more briefly still ? We all sailed together a little 
way westward. Then some of us thought we had had 
enough of sailing, while others sailed on a long way 
farther westward still. 

Now about the second voyage no one doubts for a 
moment. Every man in Britain and in America keeps 
it in his memory. It is about the first voyage that some 
of us are less clear. Indeed, in one sense all of us must 
be less clear about it. None of us can have that minute 
knowledge of the first voyage which some of us have of 
the second. But I mean that some of us are less clear 
about it in another sense — that some of us hardly take it 



22 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES 






in as a fact, and certainly do not carry it about in their 
memories as they do the fact of the second voyage. It 
is neither wonderful nor blameable if it be so ; it is but 
few of us who are likely to dwell with the same kind of 
memory, I might say with the same kind of affection, on 
a distant fact, to be made out mainly by curious research, 
and on a comparatively recent fact whose results thrust 
themselves on our notice at every moment. My own 
thoughts, my own studies, have made the earlier fact 
seem as natural, as familiar, to me as the later fact. But 
I cannot expect this to be so with every one, or indeed 
with many people. Still, the fact is none the less a fact ; 
and we ought to keep that fact as clearly and as con- 
stantly in our memories as its nature will allow us. 
I wish just now specially to bring out the fact, to 
bring it out in the broadest and simplest way, that 
there was such a first voyage, that there is such 
an older home of our people, that there is a land 
which once stood to the British home of our peo- 
ple in the same relation in which the British home 
of our people stands to this American home. Mark, I 
say, "which once stood; " I cannot venture to say "which 
still stands." There are a crowd of points of unlikeness 
between the two cases, the natural result of historical 
causes — points of unlikeness some of which will doubt- 
less at once occur to you, and of some of which I shall 
myself speak hereafter. But I have now to speak of the 
points of likeness, not of the points of unlikeness. I 
have not now to dwell on the vast differences of detail 
between the first and the second migration, between the 
ancient settlement of the English in Britain and the later 
settlement in America. I have now simply to insist on 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 23 

the fact that there was such an earlier settlement — that 
we had an earlier home, and moved from that earlier 
home, and to assert that the general history of the whole 
English people is not rightly understood unless those 
facts are constantly and carefully borne in mind. 

As then your history, the history of that part of 
the English people which settled on American soil, 
does not begin on American soil, as you have an 
equal right with us in the history of our common fore- 
fathers on British soil, so that common history in which 
we have a common right did not begin on British soil. 
As the fathers and founders of this English nation in 
America brought with them their tongue, their laws, their 
national being, from an older home, so our common 
fathers and founders, the fathers and founders of the 
English nation in Britain, brought with them their ' 
tongue, their laws, their national being, from an earlier 
home still. If you are a colony — the word, if rightly 
understood, is not a disparaging one — we are a colony 
also. If the English settlements in America were, in 
times which seem almost recent, colonies of the older 
England in Britain, so those settlements in Britain which 
made that older England were themselves colonies of 
the still older England on the continent of Europe. 

I have used the word colony, and I have said that I 
do not use it in any disparaging sense. You will feel 
that I do not do so when I apply it equally to my own 
England and to yours. I use the word, because I have 
no better word to use, and because the word, if rightly 
denned, perfectly suits my purpose. I have simply to 
guard against what I hold to be an abuse of it. The 



24 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

word colony to most minds perhaps suggests, if not 
bondage, yet imperfect freedom. It suggests the notion 
of a body of settlers from some country who still re- 
main in a state of greater or less dependence on the 
mother-country ; it suggests communities which are not 
free and independent states in the highest sense. Now 
this is an use of the word which may do very well in the 
colonial office of any country which has dependent 
colonies : it will not do for the purposes of the histo- 
rian. For we have no other word than colony to express 
settlements the very essence of which was that they 
were independent of the mother-country from the be- 
ginning. We speak of colonies in the days of ancient 
Greece. Syracuse was a colony of Corinth ; Tarentum 
was a colony of Sparta; Miletos was a colony of 
Athens. That does not mean that those cities were 
from the beginning dependencies of Corinth, Sparta, 
and Athens ; the very name implies that they were 
independent from the beginning. As a mere matter of 
etymology, the word colony represents, or rather is, 
the Latin colonia ; but in neither of its uses does it 
represent its meaning. A Roman colony was not a 
colony either in the sense in which Syracuse was a 
colony of Corinth, or in the sense in which the Eng- 
lish settlements in Australia are colonies of Great Brit- 
ain. A Roman colony was not, like the Greek or 
the English colony, a settlement in a land either unin- 
habited or inhabited by men of some wholly alien and 
commonly inferior race. A Roman colony was in its 
beginning a Roman garrison planted in some other 
Italian town to keep that town in obedience to Rome. 
The colonists were not settlers in a new land who had 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 25 

to create everything for themselves : they took pos- 
session of houses and lands already built and tilled — 
the houses and lands in many cases of men of their 
own blood and speech. Such a colony has nothing in 
common with the colonies of modern Europe. Colony 
in the modern sense and colonia in the Roman sense 
mean two different things. But colony in the modern 
sense represents, or ought to represent, the Greek 
drtocxia. That word, expressing the settlement of men 
who go from one home to another, is the word which 
describes the relation between Syracuse and Corinth, be- 
tween Miletos and Athens. It is, I venture to think, the 
word which expresses the relation between this newer 
England and the older one. Once on a time thirteen fa- 
mous colonies of the older England voted that they were 
and ought to be free and independent States. By that vote 
they ceased, in the sense of a colonial office, to be English 
colonies any longer. In the sense of history they became 
English colonies more truly than before. As long as they 
were dependent, they hardly deserved the name ; it was 
only when they won independence that they became, in 
the full sense, axotxoe, dwellers in another home. In 
the language of history, by winning independence they 
ceased to be provinces ; they did not cease to be colonies. 
It was independence only which made them colonies of 
England in the highest sense — which made them in the 
truest sense a new England, the peer of the elder Eng- 
land. As the Greek colonies in Southern Italy came to 
bear the name of the Great Greece, so it may be that 
this newer England on the American continent is fated 
to be the Great England, in distinction from what is cer- 
tainly physically the smaller England in its European 



26 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

island. But whether less or equal or greater, the thir- 
teen colonies, and the later States which have sprung up 
around them, did not, in becoming free and independ- 
ent States, cease to be, in the true sense, colonies of 
the older England. And in that sense the settlements 
which made up that older England were themselves col- 
onies of an older England still. As Massachusetts and 
Virginia were colonies of the second England in the 
European island, so Wessex and Northumberland were 
colonies of the first England on the European main- 
land. 

Now, when I speak of the first England on the Euro- 
pean mainland, I must ask, for the purposes at least of 
this first lecture, to be allowed the same kind of geo- 
graphical licence which I took in speaking of the third 
England on the American mainland. As there is a cer- 
tain part of the American continent to which the name 
of New England belongs in the strictest and most fami- 
liar usage, so there is a certain part of the European con- 
tinent to which the name of Old England belongs, 
perhaps somewhat less strictly, certainly somewhat less 
familiarly. I mean the land of Angeln on the borders of 
Germany and Denmark. Angeln and England are truly 
the same name; or, more truly still, there is just that 
difference between the two names which marks England 
as a colony of Angeln. Englaland, England, is strictly 
the land of the Engle, Angli, English; the name of the 
people is on the face of it older than the name of the 
land ; the land simply takes its name from the people. 
It is therefore not wonderful that we do not find the 
name England in use till some centuries after the settle- 
ment of the English had given a part of Britain the right 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 2*J 

to bear it. But Angeln is one of those cases in which 
the name of the land and the name of the people are in 
the strictest sense one and the same. It is so with not a 
few names in old Greek and in modern German. Preus- 
sen, Sachsen, Hessen, are at once the names of the people 
and the names of the land. We may be sure that in all 
these cases the name of the people is really the older, 
and that the land did take its name from them ; but the 
fact is not so openly proclaimed as it is in the case of 
names like England, Scotland, Finland. So in names 
within the isle of Britain, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, are strict- 
ly the names of the people — West-seaxe, Sud-seaxe, East- 
seaxe. We use exactly the same form when we speak 
of Wales as a land ; for Wales is simply the name which 
we have chosen to give to the British people, the Wealas 
or strangers. Now all these names passed, so to speak, 
of themselves from the people to the land ; there is no dis- 
tinction whatever between the name of the people and 
the name of the land. But there is a kind of conscious- 
ness about such a name as England when given by a peo- 
ple to their own land. It was gradually found that the Teu- 
tonic settlements in Britain needed a common name, and 
the common name that they took was the name of the 
greatest tribe among them. It is quite fitting that such 
a primitive form as Angeln should be the name of the 
old motherland, the land of those who stayed behind — 
though it is said that in Angeln, strictly so called, nobody 
did stay behind — and that such a form as England, a later 
form — I might almost say a colonial form — should be the 
name of the land of those who left the old home to plant 
colonies in the isle of Britain. And mark that much the 
same thing has happened with the northern part of the 



28 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

island as with the southern. That northern part we call 
Scotland, but the older home of the Scots was in Erin or 
Ireland. From that older home they planted a colony 
in the isle of Britain. Now we never call the old home 
of the Scots by the name of Scotland: we give that name 
only to the land occupied by the Scottish colony in Brit- 
ain, exactly as we give the name of England to the land 
occupied by the English colony. There is then a real 
and fitting distinction between Angeln, the older name 
of the motherland, and England, the much later name 
of the colony. But, as names of two successive homes 
of the English people, each implying in different ways 
that the land so called is the land of the English, we 
may count Angela and England as the same name, as 
opposed to the names of any other people and their 
land, as opposed to any other names of our own people 
and our own land. And when I wish to group our three 
homes and their names in an emphatic way, it certainly 
answers my purpose better to speak of Angeln as Old Eng- 
land than to speak of England as New Angeln. Our name 
is the same in either land ; how we came by the name I will 
not too curiously inquire. Those who said that we were 
called Angles because we lived in an angle or corner of 
the land, and those who said that we were so called from 
our angelic faces, both simply showed that they had 
learned more Latin than was good for them. Whether 
any of us, in either of our homes, will be better pleased 
to think that we may be called from an a?igle or a hook, I 
will not take upon myself to determine. It is enough 
for my purpose that we are the Engle, Angli, English, 
and that Angeln and England are alike names of lands 
in which the folk of the Engle have dwelled. And I do 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 29 

not think that I take an unwarrantable liberty in calling 
both lands by the more familiar form of the common 
name, and in speaking of the land of Angeln as Old 
England. 

But I have said that I mean to take a real geogra- 
phical liberty in the old world, as I have already done in 
the new. As I have, for the purpose of these lectures, 
ventured to give a wider sense than is usual to the name 
of New England, so I must venture to give a like wide 
sense to the name of Old England. As I cannot at all 
afford to shut up the name of New England within the 
narrow bounds of the lands which are specially known 
as the New England States, so I cannot at all afford to 
shut up the name of Old England within the much nar- 
rower bounds of the proper Angeln in a corner of the 
duchy of Sleswick. As I must ask leave to carry, for 
my special purposes, the name of New England beyond 
the Alleghanies, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the 
Rocky Mountains, and to give it no boundary short 
of the Eastern Ocean, so I must ask leave to carry the 
name of Old England beyond the Eider, beyond the 
Elbe, beyond the Weser, to the shores of the lake 
which burst its bounds and became the Zuyder Zee. 
Nay, I shall not quarrel with any one who will allow 
me to carry the name further still beyond the mouths 
of the Scheld, perhaps even to the mouth of the Somme. 
I do not mean that there ever was a time when the name 
of England, or even the name of Angeln, was ever ap- 
plied to these lands, any more than I mean that the 
name of New England is commonly applied to the whole 
extent of your North American Union. I only mean 
that, as it is historically accurate to give the name of 



30 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

New England the wider sense, so it needs but a very 
slight historical licence to do the like by the name of 
Old England. The wider and unfamiliar sense serves 
best to suit my immediate purpose; it more forcibly 
sets forth the historic truth which it is my present ob- 
ject to set forth. That object is to point out that what 
the isle of Britain was to the continent of North Amer- 
ica, a certain part of the continent of Europe was, ages 
before, to the isle of Britain. That part of the continent 
of Europe it is perhaps easier to point out than to define. 
Among the Teutonic settlers in Britain some tribes 
stand out conspicuously; Angles, Saxons, and Jutes 
stand out conspicuously above all. The Jutes led the 
way ; from the Angles the land and the united nation 
took their name; the Saxons gave us the name by which 
our Celtic neighbours have ever known us. But there is 
no reason to confine the area from which our forefathers 
came to the space which we should mark on the map 
as the land of the continental Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. 
So great a migration is always likely to be swollen by 
some who are quite alien to the leading tribe; it is 
always certain to be swollen by many who are of stocks 
akin to the leading tribe, but who do not actually belong 
to it. As we in Britain are those who stayed behind at the 
time of the second great migration of our people, so I ven- 
ture to look on all our Low-Dutch kinsfolk on the con- 
tinent of Europe as those who stayed behind at the time 
of the first great migration of our people. Our special 
hearth and cradle is doubtless to be found in the imme- 
diate marchland of Germany and Denmark, but the great 
common home of our people is to be looked on as 
stretching along the whole of that long coast where 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 3 1 

various dialects of the Low-Dutch tongue are spoken. 
If Angles and Saxons came, we know that Frisians came 
also, and with Frisians as an element among us, it is 
hardly too bold to claim the whole Netherlands as in 
the widest sense Old England, as the land of one 
part of the kinsfolk who stayed behind. Through that 
whole region, from the special Anglian corner far into 
what is now northern France, the true tongue of the 
people, sometimes overshadowed by other tongues, is 
some dialect or other of that branch of the great Teu- 
tonic family which is essentially the same as our own 
speech. From Flanders to Sleswick the natural tongue 
is one which differs from English only as the historical 
events of fourteen hundred years of separation have in- 
evitably made the two tongues — two dialects, I should 
rather say, of the same tongue — to differ. From these 
lands we came as a people. That was our first histor- 
ical migration. Our remote forefathers must have made 
endless earlier migrations as parts of the great Aryan 
body, as parts of the smaller Teutonic body. But our 
voyage from the Low-Dutch mainland to the isle of 
Britain was our first migration as a people. It was our 
first migration after we had worked out for ourselves a 
separate being and a separate tongue. It was the first 
migration of men, some of whom already actually bore 
the English name, while others bore the names of those 
kindred tribes which joined with the proper Engle to 
make up the English nation. The forefathers of Angles, 
Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, must once have dwelled in 
Eastern Europe, even in central Asia. But Angles, 
Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, as nations or tribes distin- 
guished by those names from other Aryan, from other 



32 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Teutonic, nations or tribes, cannot be traced further 
away from Britain than the old Angeln, the old Saxony, 
arid the other neighbouring and kindred lands. From 
those lands their first voyage led them into the isle of 
Britain, some to make that isle their home for ever, 
some to make it a halting-place of ages before they 
started on a second and longer voyage. 

The history of our people then begins in the Low- 
Dutch lands of the European mainland. It there parts 
off into the history of those who went forth to win for 
themselves new homes in Britain, and the history of those 
who abode in the old continental home. The history of 
those who went forth to win for themselves new homes 
in Britain again, after many ages, parts off into the history 
of those who went forth to. win for themselves new homes 
in North America, and the history of those who abode in 
the old island home. Such is our history in few words. 
The tie which thus binds together the Middle England 
and the New, the England in Britain and the England in 
America, is, I trust, not hard to understand, not hard to 
feel. It is, from obvious reasons, not so easy to under- 
stand or to feel the tie which should bind both Middle 
England and New to the oldest England of all. It is a 
tie which it needs some searching to find out, one which 
does not, like the other, force itself upon the mind by the 
most obvious witness of language, of history, of all that 
makes divided brethren to be brethren still. But the tie 
is still real ; it is still living. Let us look back to the 
earliest times when we have any sure knowledge of our 
own people. Let us look to the first century of our sera, 
to the early days of Imperial Rome. Let us seek for a 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 33 

national hero in those days. It will be easy to find him ; 
but we may be tempted to look for him in the wrong 
place. We may be tempted to see him in the hero of 
another race who fought for a land which was in after- 
times to become England, rather than in the hero of our 
own race who fought for a land which, in a wide sense, 
was England then. We may be tempted to see him in 
Celtic Caractacus rather than in Teutonic Arminius. 
Yet Arminius was a man of our own blood ; Carac- 
tacus was a man of another blood. The deeds of Carac- 
tacus had no visible effect on our English history ; the 
day when Arminius smote down Varus was one of the 
greatest days in the history of our race. Had the 
Roman overcome northern Germany as he overcame 
southern Britain, the English people could never have 
been what it was in later history, or, more truly, the 
English people could never have been at all. I have 
little doubt that, if the distinction is to be drawn at 
all, Arminius and his fellows would be found to belong 
to the Low-Dutch rather than to the High-Dutch divi- 
sion of the Teutonic race. But it may be safer to look 
on that distinction as one of later date, and to say that, 
up to the fifth century, the Teuton whose descendants 
were to abide in Germany and the Teuton whose descend- 
ants were to make the voyage to Britain had one com- 
mon history, exactly as, up to the seventeenth century, 
the Englishman whose descendants were to abide in 
Britain and the Englishman whose descendants were to 
make the voyage to America had one common history. 
In any case, if the Roman power had in the second 
century incorporated Germany as it incorporated Gaul 
and Spain, no English people, no Teutonic people of 



34 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

any kind, could have grown up as they did grow up. 
The men by Elbe and Weser, instead of being ready 
to bring Teutonic speech, Teutonic law, Teutonic free- 
dom, into the isle of Britain, would have been mere 
Roman provincials, among whom freedom would have 
been a name, and who could have known no speech or 
law but the speech and law of their conquerors. In this 
sense Arminius saved the national life, the national free- 
dom, of the English people, before it had become the 
English people, no less truly than those who saved the 
national life and freedom of the fully-grown English 
people of later times. In this sense the old Cheruscan 
hero, the liberator of Germany, may claim a place in 
the annals of our race alongside of ^Elfred and Dunstan, 
alongside of Stephen Langton and Simon of Montfort, 
alongside of Pym and Hampden, alongside of Halifax 
and Somers, alongside of Washington and Hamilton. 
In this sense we of the English folk on either side of 
Ocean may praise famous men and our fathers that 
begat us, even while we speak of the men of days when 
the special English nation had as yet no being, but when 
there was already work to do for the greater race of 
which the English nation is but a part. 

And as with fathers, so with brethren. Of all parts of 
the European mainland, we should surely look with the 
keenest interest on the lands which are still inhabited by 
those men of our own race who stayed behind. To this 
day in a large part of that long line of coast from whence 
our fathers came, dwell men who come of our own stock, 
and who speak tongues near akin to our own — who more 
strictly speak our own tongue in another shape. And 
the history of those lands is no mean history. The his- 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 35 

tory of the Hanseatic League, the history of the United 
Provinces, is one of which we may well be proud to 
think that it has been wrought by men of our own kin. 
Nowhere on the mainland of Europe, save in the eternal 
democracy of the Swiss mountains, did the old freedom 
linger on to a later day than it lingered in the Frisian 
sea-lands. Nowhere did men wage a better fight for 
ancient rights than the men of Ditmarsch waged against 
the counts of Holstein and kings of Denmark. An his- 
torian of your own has told the tale of the men who, 
driven to strive alike against nature and against man, 
knew how to win the free soil of Holland and Zealand, 
first from the sea and then from the Spaniard. But it 
adds a deeper charm to that tale if we bear in mind that 
it is part of the history of our own people — if we think 
that the men who wrought that work among the dykes 
and channels of the old Frisian shore were not only fel- 
low-workers in the same cause, but were in truth kins- 
folk of the same household, as the men who wrought 
the same work in the British island and on the American 
mainland. You, men of the second colony, will, I trust, 
allow that you did not take away all the goodness of the 
old stock from what to you is the elder home. Some- 
thing was, I trust, left behind in the isle of Britain to do 
deeds in yet later times not wholly unworthy of the long 
earlier history which we have in common. And so we, 
men of the first colony, and you, men of the second 
colony, also, may well bear in mind that something was 
left in the oldest home of all to do deeds not unworthy 
of the common stock of all. 

And, speaking on this side of Ocean, I cannot forget 
that, in one part of your land at least, there are men in 



36 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

whose history the first and the second voyage are the 
same — men whose fathers came straight from the oldest 
England to the newest, without ever passing through the 
middle home of our folk. I cannot forget that along- 
side of New England specially so called lies the land 
which once was New Netherlands. I cannot forget that 
there are still in your land not a few whose names and 
pedigrees proclaim them to belong to that branch of the 
common stock by which New Netherlands were settled. 
For, from my point of view, the men of New Netherlands 
are as much a branch of the common stock as the men 
who settled in Maine or in Georgia or the men who 
stayed behind in Britain. You, men of Boston, proclaim 
by the name of your city that your motherland was the 
British Holland, that Holland of which the elder Boston 
is the head. Those who came to New Amsterdam from 
the other Holland on the European mainland did but 
make the same journey more speedily, in a single pull 
instead of two. There are vessels which start from the 
havens of the elder Saxony, which halt in Britain on the 
West-Saxon shore, and which then make their way, it 
may be to New England strictly so called, it may be to 
what was New Netherlands. The every-day course of a 
North-German steamer is in truth a type of the history 
of our race. It starts from the oldest home of our blood 
and speech to make its way to the newest. But it begins 
by making its way, in the very wake of Cerdic and Cyn- 
ric, to the home which lies between the two, the Middle 
England on the British soil. 

The tie which binds the New England to the Middle 
is indeed, from many causes, far closer than that which 
binds the Middle England to the Old. But this last tie, 



OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ENGLAND. 37 

far less close as it is, is equally real. We shall not 
rightly understand the history of our people if we forget 
either. I have said that, when the keels of Hengest drew 
near to the Kentish shore, they bore with them the germs 
of the American commonwealth as well as the germs of 
the English kingdom. I will go further back. When 
Augustus vainly called on Varus to give him back the 
legions which had fallen beneath the Cheruscan sword, he 
was mourning for an event but for which we could never 
have stood here as we now stand. But for that me- 
morable day in the childhood of our people, neither the 
League of the Hansa nor the Union of Utrecht, neither the 
Great Charter of England nor the Federal Constitution 
of America, could ever have had a place on the page of 
history. 



LECTURE II. 

OTje Ettgltef) iiame. 

I asked in my first lecture that I might, for that 
once, be allowed to say my say after my own fash- 
ion, and that I might keep objections and answers to 
objections for another time. I said that, though I did 
not believe that I should say anything new, I should 
most likely say some things that might be startling, 
some things that might easily seem open to objection. 
Now I am so old a stager in controversy, I am so used 
to assaults of all kinds, reasonable and unreasonable, 
that I think I pretty well know the kind of objections 
which are likely to be brought. I may even go a 
step further. I have already ventured to say that I 
believe I know the answers to those objections. I 
am not at all clear that I could not write a fairly plau- 
sible answer to myself; only I am much surer that I 
could write a rejoinder to that answer which should 
be something more than plausible. So, as I asked 
to be allowed to enjoy a dogmatic evening the other 
night, I shall venture to treat you to a controversial 
evening now. But, in disputing, I wish as far as possible 
to dispute about things and not about names. I say as 
far as possible, because one cannot help to some extent 
disputing about names. We must do so for this reason, 
that in very truth names are things. In itself it is a 

38 



THE ENGLISH NAJVffe. 39 

matter of indifference by what mere sound anything is 
called. It is merely through the course which the his- 
tory of language happens to have taken that a certain 
meaning has come to be attached to one sound and 
another meaning to another. But when the meaning is 
once attached to the sound, the name becomes something 
more than a sound ; it becomes a thing, a fact. So long 
as an accurate impression of facts is conveyed, it does 
not matter in the least by what words — that is, by what 
sounds — that impression is conveyed. That is, it does 
not matter as far as the facts are concerned ; it may 
matter on some other ground, as a matter of metrical 
harmony or of literary style. On some of these latter 
grounds I may have a pet word, and another man may 
have another pet word ; but if his word and mine con- 
vey the same idea with equal clearness, one word is as 
good as the other for the purpose of conveying knowledge. 
The question between them is strictly a question of words ; 
it is a purely literary question, not a question of history or 
science. But when meanings have got so closely attached 
to words that one word gives a correct impression of 
facts while another word gives an incorrect impression, 
then the question between the two words is no longer a 
mere question of words ; it becomes a question of facts. 
Let me take an example which will at once plunge us into 
the midst of the controversies which I have promised 
you for this evening's entertainment. Suppose I say 
that "the English people" or "the English folk began," 
while another man says that " the Anglo-Saxon race 
commenced." Wherever my words differ from his, I 
like each of my words better than his, and I can tell 
you why I like each of them better. But my reason for 



40 THE ENGLISH*PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

liking them better would not be the same in all three cases. 
I like "begin" better than "commence" on a purely 
literary ground. For the purpose of conveying the 
meaning one word is as good as the other. But I like 
the sound and the associations of the word "begin" 
better than the sound and the associations of the word 
" commence." When a Teutonic and a Romance word each 
expresses the same idea equally well — how much more 
then when the Teutonic word expresses the idea much 
better — I like to use the Teutonic word better than the 
Romance word. But the question between " begin " and 
" commence " is purely a question of words ; it has 
nothing to do with facts. But when I speak of " the 
English people" or "the English folk," and the other 
man speaks of "the Anglo-Saxon race," I hold that it 
is no longer a mere question of words, but that it has 
become a question of facts. The thoughts of the man 
who uses the other formula may be every whit as accu- 
rate as my thoughts ; but I maintain that he does not 
choose the words that are most likely to convey his 
thoughts accurately to others. I maintain that, though 
he may thoroughly know the facts himself, he is likely 
to give to others a wrong impression of the facts. In 
this sense I hold that the question between " English 
people " and " Anglo-Saxon race " is not, like the 
question between " begin " and " commence," a mere 
question of words ; I hold that it touches, not words 
only, but facts also. 

We have now fairly reached the domain of controversy ; 
but before I say anything at all controversial, or even apo- 
logetic, about my subject, may I say a word or two about 
myself? A great many strange things have been said of 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 4 1 

me in Middle England ; for aught I know some strange 
things may have been said of me in New England also. 
I know that strange things have been said of me, pos- 
sibly in Old England in the wide sense in which I have 
defined Old England, certainly within those once Slavonic 
and now Teutonic lands which lie beyond Old England. 
I once saw a book of mine reviewed in the High-Dutch 
tongue, in which review I was throughout spoken of as 
though I belonged to New England and not to Middle. 
I was American, and I showed it in every page — " er 
bleibt immer Amerikaner." Better to carry out this 
theory, the Cambridge in England at which I have had 
the honor to show myself once or twice was taken to be 
your neighbouring Cambridge on the other side of your 
river. Well, here I had nothing to complain of, except 
the complaint that one brings against every statement 
of the thing which is not. It might just as well have 
been as the Berlin critic fancied ; only it was not so. It 
is much harder when I am told that I am " the great 
enemy of the name Anglo-Saxon," or of the name " Char- 
lemagne," or of any other name. It is hardest of all 
when I am told that all that I have ever done has been 
to " alter the spelling of the names of the Anglo-Saxon 
kings." Now as for spelling, I have always preached 
the extremest doctrine of liberty of spelling. At the 
utmost, I have only asked to be allowed to indulge my 
own fancies and to allow other people to indulge theirs. 
I did not at all know that I had altered the spelling 
of the names of the Anglo-Saxon kings. I thought 
that I had spelled them as my predecessors and 
teachers, Kemble and Lappenberg, spelled them before 
me. At all events, I was vain enough to think that 



42 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE I-N ITS THREE HOMES. 

if I had done that, it was not all that I had done ; I 
really believed that I had done one or two things be- 
sides. Anyhow, when I learn that I have changed or 
invented or done something strangely and dangerously 
novel in this very small matter of spelling — and in one 
or two other matters — I can only guess that my critics 
have not read the writings of the scholars who went 
before me ; I am quite certain that they have not read 
mine. In short, with all the advances which our age 
has made in natural science, mental science, social sci- 
ence, and all the other sciences, it still remains what, if 
I were to use a hard word, I might call a mythopceic 
age. Certainly it grows quite as thick a crop of legends 
as ever grew in the days of Homer or in the days of 
Beowulf. Of such legends I have had the honor to be 
myself the subject of several ; and, as I dabble a little 
in comparative mythology, I believe that I can take a 
calm, and even a scientific, view of a legend about 
myself as well as of a legend about anybody else. In 
such legends I can often see, as in other legends, the 
small kernel of truth round which the mythical details 
have gathered ; sometimes I cannot see even that. But 
there is one common saying about me which I sincerely 
hope is in no sense legendary, but rather that it is true 
to the letter. It has often been said in Middle England 
— it may, for aught I know, be said in New England — 
that I am a pedant. Well, in the sense in which that 
word is used, I will not speak so highly of myself as to 
say that I am a pedant; but I will say that I do my best 
to be one. What I understand by a pedant in such cases 
is a man who first tries to think accurately — that is, to 
make his thoughts conformable to facts — and who then 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 43 

tries to speak accurately — that is, to make his words 
conformable to his thoughts. Now this twofold pro- 
cess takes some trouble ; therefore the man who feels 
that he has not taken this trouble, and who is in his 
heart ashamed of himself for not having taken it, re- 
lieves himself outwardly by calling the man who has 
taken it a pedant. I warn you then that, at all events 
in this present lecture, when I shall have, more than in 
the others, to say something about words and names, 
when I shall perhaps have to draw some distinctions 
which, to those who are not pedants and do not try to 
be pedants, may seem to be distinctions without differ- 
ences, I shall treat every word, name, and thing as pe- 
dantically as I know how. I shall at least strive in all 
things to come as near to the honourable character of a 
pedant as the measure of my natural gifts will enable 
me to come. 

To speak then with as near an approach to pedantry 
as I can reach to, it is certainly true that I have, in my 
former lecture and in many other places, used the word 
" English " where many people would have used the word 
" Anglo-Saxon." I can even believe that some people 
may have been surprised, that some may even have been 
puzzled — I will not believe that any one can have been 
offended — at my using the one word rather than the 
other. I have known people surprised and puzzled at it 
in Middle England ; and here in New England I think I 
can see rather obvious reasons why it may grate on a 
natural vein of feeling for which there is no room in 
Middle England. Now I use the one word rather 
than the other, for the very simple but undoubtedly 



44 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

pedantic reason that it better expresses the facts of the 
case than the other, that it is less likely to lead to con- 
fusion and misapprehension than the other. But in no 
case can I allow that its use is any peculiarity of mine, 
any invention of mine, any novelty of my own personal 
devising. In using the name English as the name of our 
people in all its homes, from our first appearance as a 
people to this day on which we are now met, I have 
simply followed those who have gone before me, those 
from whom I learned most in earlier days. I have fol- 
lowed the teaching, though not the practice, of Sir Fran- 
cis Palgrave; I have followed the practice of my still 
more immediate master, Dr. Guest. If any one has been 
guilty of innovation, that deadliest of crimes in a world 
which is always changing, in this simple matter of no- 
menclature, it is they who are the offenders, and not I. It 
seemed to me that they had good reasons for the rule 
which the one laid down and which the other followed ; 
therefore I followed it too ; but on the score of inven- 
tion, innovation, and so forth, I certainly deserve neither 
praise nor blame; the praise or blame must all go to 
my teachers. 

I am half ashamed to be talking and disputing so 
much about a name ; but, after all, the question is not 
merely a question of names ; and I fancy moreover that 
the question naturally comes in a rather different light 
on the two sides of Ocean. It may therefore not be 
wholly useless to speak a little more fully on this very 
pedantic question of nomenclature. 

First then, I altogether disclaim the character which 
has been laid upon me of " the great enemy of the name 
Anglo-Saxon." Unhappily, there are so many things in 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 45 

the world of which one cannot help being the enemy 
that I can hardly fancy myself finding time to become 
the enemy of a name, except so far as it may, instead 
of representing a fact, represent the opposite to a fact. 
Least of all should I pick out for my enmity a name 
which not uncommonly forms part of the royal style of 
Glorious ^ithelstan and his successors. Kind people 
have before now got together for my benefit a large 
number of instances to prove the use of the word 
" Anglo-Saxon " in the tenth and eleventh centuries. 
But they might have spared their trouble; I have al- 
ready got together the same instances and more also in 
the Appendix to the first volume of my History of 
the Norman Conquest. Nobody who knew anything 
of ancient documents ever doubted that the name 
" Anglo-Saxon " was in established, but by no means 
common, use in the tenth and eleventh centuries. My 
contention is simply this ; because a certain name 
was used in one sense — a perfectly clear and veiy 
narrow sense — in the tenth century, it does not follow 
that it is well to use it in the nineteenth century in two 
senses, both of which seem to me to be misleading, and 
which certainly are quite different both from one another 
and from the ancient sense. I do not think that such 
an use of language can be the use most likely to lead to 
clearness and accuracy of thought. Let me run shortly 
through the plain facts of the case, though I have, in 
different shapes and at different lengths, gone through 
them a thousand and one times already. 

Among 1 the Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain, 
two, the Angles and the Saxons, stood out foremost. These 
two between them occupied by far the greater part of 



46 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

the land that was occupied at all. Each of these two 
gave its name to the united nation, but each gave it on 
different lips. The Saxons were the earlier invaders; 
they had more to do with the Celtic remnant which 
abode in the land. On the lips then of the Celtic inhab- 
itants of Britain, the whole of the Teutonic inhabitants 
of Britain were known from the beginning, and are known 
still, as Saxons. But, as the various Teutonic settlements 
drew together, as they began to have common national 
feelings and to feel the need of a common national name, 
the name which they chose was not the same as that 
by which their Celtic neighbours called them. They did 
not call themselves Saxons and their land Saxony ; they 
called themselves English and their land England. I 
used the word Saxony in all seriousness ; it is a real 
name for the Teutonic part of Britain, and it is an older 
name than the name England. But it is a name used 
only from the outside by Celtic neighbours and enemies ; 
it was not used from the inside by the Teutonic people 
themselves. In their mouths, as soon as they took to 
themselves a common name, that name was English ; as 
soon as they gave their land a common name, that name 
was England. And that usage has gone on to this day, 
without break or change, without variableness or shadow 
of turning. At no time, in the ninth century or the 
nineteenth, would a Teutonic inhabitant of Britain, if 
asked his nationality, as opposed either to the inhabit- 
ants of some other land or to the Celtic inhabitants of 
his own land, have called himself by any name but 
Angle, English. The English name is general, it is 
national ; the Saxon name is only local. The English 
name is constantly used so as to take in the Saxon; the 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 47 

Saxon name is never used, on Teutonic mouths speaking 
the Teutonic tongue, so as to take in the Angle. And 
this is the more remarkable, because the age when 
English was fully established as the name of the people, 
and England as the name of the land, was an age of 
Saxon supremacy, an age when a Saxon state held 
the headship of England and of Britain, when Saxon 
kings grew step by step to be Kings of the English and 
lords of the whole British island. 

In common use then, the men of the tenth and elev- 
enth centuries knew themselves by no name but Eng- 
lish. When, in the latter half of the eleventh, they had 
more need of a national name than ever, when they 
needed a name to distinguish themselves from foreign 
conquerors in their own land, that name was English, 
and none other. In romances and romantic histories 
you find a strong opposition drawn between " Normans " 
and " Saxons." The Norman is supposed ever to have 
on his mouth the name "Saxon" as a name of contempt; 
he gibes at the " Saxon churl ;" perhaps he even goes 
out to hunt the " Saxon swine." I have lived a good 
deal in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and I think 
that I' know how men spoke then. I know no reason 
to think that a Norman settled in England ever spoke 
of his English neighbours as swine; I have no reason to 
think that he ever spoke of them as churls, unless when 
they really were of the degree of a churl, and not of any 
higher or lower degree. And I am quite certain that if 
he spoke of them as either churls or swine, he spoke of 
them not as Saxon churls or swine, but as English. Dur- 
ing the time when any distinction of the kind needed to be 
drawn in common usage — and a wonderfully short time 



48 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

that was — the distinction was always between Normans 
and English. During the much longer time during which 
the distinction, practically forgotten, went on as a sur- 
vival in legal formulae, the legal phrase always distin- 
guished French and English. Why French ? some may 
ask; for assuredly each particular Norman was hardly 
more likely to call himself a Frenchman than an Eng- 
lishman was. But French was the only general name 
which could take in all William's French-speaking fol- 
lowers, not a few of whom were far from being native 
Normans. The opposition then, as long as any was 
made, was made between " Norman and English," be- 
tween " French and English ;" never between " Normans 
and Saxons." The distinction died out as the Norman 
born on English ground learned to feel as an English- 
man, to call himself an Englishman. Of this I am cer- 
tain : no native of England speaking his own tongue 
ever spoke of himself as a Saxon, unless, as belonging 
to the strictly Saxon part of England, he wished to 
distinguish himself from an Angle or a Jute. 

Still less did any man ever call himself an Anglo- 
Saxon. I feel sure that no man, in the times of which 
I am speaking, ever did call himself so ; but, if he did, 
I am sure he must have meant to say that one of his 
parents was an Angle and the other a Saxon. By An- 
glo-Saxon many people mean Englishmen living before 
the year 1066, as distinguished from Englishmen living 
after that year. I need hardly stop to prove that no man, 
either before or after the year 1066, could ever have 
called himself an Anglo-Saxon in this sense. Neither 
did any man of those days call himself an Anglo- 
Saxon, meaning thereby a Saxon in England as dis~ 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 49 

tinguished from a Saxon in Germany or elsewhere. 
This is another modern use of the word, quite different 
from that in which its use ends at the year 1066. The one 
use is chronological ; the other is geographical. And 
I have often wondered how it is that "Anglo-Saxons" 
and " Anglo-Normans " seem to mean Saxons and Nor- 
mans settled in England, while " Anglo-Indians " and 
"Anglo-Americans" seem to mean English settled 
in India or America. The truth is, that no one man 
ever called himself an Anglo-Saxon at all in any sense. 
But it is undoubtedly true that, in a certain sense and 
under certain circumstances, men did speak of the nation 
as Anglo-Saxons. But it is only in one very distinct 
sense and under somewhat restricted circumstances. The 
common every-day name was English; Anglo-Saxon 
was a grander and more formal name, used only now 
and then. Let me tell you how it is used. First, in 
England itself it is invariably used in the plural ; one 
Anglo-Saxon, all by himself, seems to have been a thing 
unheard of. Secondly, it is very seldom used, except in 
the royal style. We hear not uncommonly of a King of 
the Anglo-Saxons ; but, as we never hear of one Anglo- 
Saxon all by himself, so we very seldom hear of the 
whole company of Anglo-Saxons except in reference to 
their king. Thirdly, while the phrase is not uncommon 
in Latin, it is excessively rare in English, and the two or 
three times when it is found in English it is in the royal 
style. Fourthly, even as a Latin style of the king 
it is all but wholly confined to formal documents, and 
even in those it is rare compared with the simpler name 
" English." In ordinary writing it is excessively rare, 
even in Latin, and it is absolutely unknown in English. 



$0 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

I mean that the king, in a solemn Latin document, not 
uncommonly called himself King of the Anglo-Saxons— 
that for him to call himself so in a solemn English doc- 
ument was not absolutely unknown — but that an historian, 
telling his story himself, very seldom used the word, 
even if he were speaking of the king in Latin, and that 
in ordinary English narrative it was never used at all. 
With the smallest possible chance of exceptions, we may 
say that on English mouths the name Anglo-Saxon is 
confined to the royal style and the Latin language, and 
is comparatively rare even there. 

Now, in what sense is the word used on those rare 
occasions when it is used ? Not surely to mean Saxons 
in England as distinguished from Saxons in Germany; 
still less, by any prophetic insight, to mean Englishmen 
before io66» If ^Ethelstan called himself King of the An- 
glo-Saxons, he did not mean to say, Remember that I, 
King ^Ethelstan, lived before the Norman Conquest. The 
phrase is simply a contraction. Rex Anglorum, King of 
the Angles or English, was after all an inadequate de- 
scription of a prince a large part of whose subjects 
were Saxons and not Angles, whose immediate king- 
dom was Saxon, and who came of a Saxon stock. His 
truer and more formal title was Rex Anglorum et Sax- 
onum, King of the Angles and Saxons. And, by a 
not very wonderful abridgement, that title sometimes 
became Rex Anglo-Saxonum, King of the Anglo-Sax- 
ons. That is simply all ; the word is a contracted 
form, which, in England at least, was never in ordinary 
use, but which was not uncommonly used in the more 
stately language of the royal style. And it was meant 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 5 I 

to describe the nation formed by the union of Angles 
and Saxons under one sovereign. 

On the other hand, the name is used somewhat more 
freely by foreign writers, and they do sometimes use it 
as meaning Saxons in England as opposed to Saxons in 
Germany. This use is not wonderful. To a writer in 
England that distinction was of no importance, or at 
least he expressed it in another way. The West-, East-, 
and South-Saxons in Britain were fully distinguished by 
their local names from the Old-Saxons who abode in Ger- 
many. To a writer in Gaul or Germany, as part of Brit- 
ain began to be known, first as Saxony, then as England, 
it would seem natural enough to distinguish its people 
from the older Saxons in Germany as Saxons in England. 
I have no doubt that in these continental writers the 
name Anglo-Saxon is sometimes used in that sense ; and I 
have once, only once, found in a foreign writer a case 
where the name is used in the singular. But the name 
went out of use ; by the twelfth century, at the latest, 
Anglia, Angli, Anglici, Angligence were the only names 
by which the Teutonic part of Britain and its people were 
known both at home and abroad. And from that day to 
this, English, and English only, has been the natural name, 
the name which comes first to every man's mind and 
tongue, as the name of the inhabitants of Teutonic Britain 
and of the lands which have been colonized from Teu- 
tonic Britain. When any other name is used, it is used 
consciously, of set purpose, with a view to draw some 
distinction or to meet some objection. English is 
equally the name by which we are known to men 
of other nations, always excepting the Celtic inhab- 
itants of the British islands ; to them, at least when 



52 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

they speak their own tongues, the Englishman is still 
the Saxon. 

I said that, when any other name than English is used, 
it is used consciously with some definite purpose. And 
I think I can see the purposes with which the word 
"Anglo-Saxon" — a word never in common use in any 
age, which was used in a special and narrow sense in 
the tenth and eleventh centuries, and which was quite 
forgotten in the twelfth — has been artificially called up 
for use in the nineteenth. It is called up for two wholly 
different purposes, to be used in two quite different 
senses — senses which have nothing to do either with one 
another or with the narrow ancient sense. One sense is 
that in which Englishmen who lived before the year 
1066 are distinguished from Englishmen who lived after 
the year 1066 by being called, sometimes " Saxons/' 
sometimes "Anglo-Saxons." The object here, I sup- 
pose, is to mark off Englishmen who lived before that 
year as being somehow a different set of people from 
Englishmen who lived after it. But the main object of 
my teaching on this subject is to insist on the fact that 
Englishmen before 1066 and Englishmen after 1066 are 
not two different sets of men, but the same set of men. 
Because therefore I wish before all things to set forth 
English history as one unbroken story — because I wish 
to set forth the Englishmen of a thousand years back 
as the forefathers of Englishmen now, and Englishmen 
now as the children of Englishmen a thousand years 
back — because I wish to bring these simple but mis- 
understood facts home to every English mind on either 
side of Ocean, — I like to use the name which clearly 
expresses the truths on which I wish to insist, rather 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 53 

than the name which practically denies or confuses 
those truths. Following then my great teachers, I 
must have one and the same name, not two different 
names, to mean Englishmen who lived before the com- 
ing of William the Norman and Englishmen who lived 
after his coming. And to that end I prefer to use the 
name by which Englishmen have uninterruptedly called 
themselves on both sides of that event, and not by 
some other name by which they never called them- 
selves. Holding that the personal identiy, so to speak, 
of the English people has remained untouched ever 
since they made the first of their two great voyages 
fourteen hundred years back, I must call them through- 
out those fourteen hundred years by some one name, 
and to that end I must choose the name by which they 
have called themselves from the earliest time when they 
found it needful to have a common name. The sub- 
ject of Edward the Confessor called himself an Eng- 
lishman, as the subject of Queen Victoria calls himself 
an Englishman now. Why am I to call the subject of 
Edward the Confessor a Saxon or an Anglo-Saxon, 
unless I am to call the subject of Queen Victoria a 
Saxon or an Anglo-Saxon also ? 

But haply some one will tell me that I shall do well 
to call the subject of Queen Victoria an Anglo-Saxon, 
above all when I speak of the subjects of Queen Victoria 
in that special light in which I wish the subjects of Queen 
Victoria to be looked on here. I shall be asked whether 
"Anglo-Saxon" is not the right name to set forth the 
brotherhood of the speakers of the English tongue all 
over the world. I answer that for that purpose too I 
rather choose the name English. And I do this on 



54 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

more grounds than one. First of all, it is the name 
which has always been used. No one ever talked of 
"the Anglo-Saxon race" and the like till quite lately; 
no one does it quite naturally; it implies a conscious 
object, a special desire to express something, to avoid 
something. It is at best an ornament of style ; it is not 
the first word which would come into a man's head as the 
obvious name for all men of English blood and English 
speech. Again, it is an ambiguous word ; it is a word 
used in two senses. Sometimes, as we have seen, it 
means Englishmen before 1 066 as distinguished from 
Englishmen after 1066. Sometimes it means men of 
English speech all over the world now in 1 881. I do 
not see why we should use the same word to express 
these two very different ideas, or why we should express 
either of them by a word which hardly exists except 
in the royal style of the tenth century. Surely the 
simplest, plainest, most natural, most obvious name, 
the name which springs most naturally to our tongues, 
the name which calls up the oldest, the noblest, the most 
thrilling, associations, is the best of all. We wish to set 
forth that we in our island, you on your continent, we 
in Middle England, you in New, are brethren in one 
common heritage, sharers in the common English blood, 
the common English speech, the common English tra- 
ditions, the common English glories. We wish to set 
forth that all that is ours is yours also, that you have an 
equal share with us in every memory, in every posses- 
sion, of which we are proud, for which we are thankful. 
How then can we refuse to you, how can you refuse to 
accept from us, the common name which for a thousand 
years has expressed the common brotherhood ? I will 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 55 

not cast about for some curious, artificial, technical, term 
dug out of some corner by antiquarian research, and 
choose that as the sign of our ancient and unbroken 
brotherhood. I will rather choose the name which 
comes straightest from the heart, which springs most 
readily to the lips. Men of New England, I claim you 
as Englishmen. Sprung as you are of English blood, 
speakers as you are of the English tongue, sharers as 
you are in the great inheritance of English law, neither 
my feelings nor my reason will allow*me to call you by 
any other name. What we are, you are ; for thirteen 
hundred years our forefathers and yours lived together, 
worked together, suffered together, conquered together. 
And all that they did they did under one name, the 
name which alone can mark that we are alike children 
of one common stock, whose sons, in whatever quarter 
of the globe they light their fires, have all kindled them 
from one common hearth. Speakers of the tongue of 
Caedmon and of Milton, inheritors of the freedom for 
which Godwine strove in one age and Hampden :'n 
another, I claim you as brethren, I call you by the one 
name which can express that brotherhood : if you cast 
aside that old familiar name, there is none other that I 
can offer. 

But it may be asked, How can two wholly distinct 
political societies, on opposite sides of the Ocean, be 
united under one common name? Some one here on 
American soil may say to me, No ; you are English in 
England, we are Americans in America. I answer back 
again, No ; we are alike English, in whatever quarter of 
the globe we dwell ; we are English in Britain, you are 



56 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

English in America. As we did not forfeit the name by 
staying behind, neither did you forfeit it by going forth. 
Nor did you forfeit it, you rather showed more fully your 
title to it, when you did as Englishmen have done in 
every age, and drew the sword against unrighteous 
rulers. Washington did not cease to be an Englishman 
because he withstood George the Third, any more than 
Hampden ceased to be an Englishman because he with- 
stood Charles the First. I have his own witness. I 
doubt greatly whether Washington or any other of the 
leaders of your War of Independence ever used the word 
" English" as the distinctive name of those against whom 
they acted. So far as I have seen, the name that was 
then used in that sense was " British." And that was 
the word which exactly expressed the truth. The strife 
w T as not a foreign war between the English and some 
other people ; it was, like civil wars of earlier times, a 
strife between two branches of the English people. It 
was a strife, if you will, between British English and 
American English ; British therefore, and not English, 
was the name by which the champions of freedom spoke 
of their enemies. But more than this, as far as I have 
seen, " British," not " English," was the word always 
used on your side of the Ocean, as the name of the 
enemy, not only in the War of Independence, but in the 
far more unhappy war of 1812. It is for you to tell 
me, rather than for me to tell you, when and why the 
more modern usage began. Anyhow, for the Kingdom 
of Great Britain and Ireland, as a power — a power not 
wholly English, but made of English, British, and Irish 
elements — the proper political and geographical adjec- 
tive is that which Washington used, the adjective Brit- 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 57 

ish. But for the English folk, wherever they dwell, what- 
ever be their form of government, whether they form one 
political society or two or many, the true national adjec- 
tive is English. We may be parted by outward and 
accidental differences, but the inward essence is the same. 
Some of us are British subjects, some of us are American 
citizens, but both alike are something which takes in 
both ; both are alike English brethren. 

And where, I would ask, is the great difficulty, the 
great wonder, in applying a common name to members 
of two distinct political communities ? There is no lack 
of precedents for such an use of names. I will not refer to 
the cases of Germany and Italy, both till our own day 
divided — Germany to some extent divided still — among 
a number of separate states. For in those lands it has 
been the great work of our own day to bring the divided 
brethren together — to work a nearly perfect union of 
Italy, to work a nearer approach to a perfect union of 
Germany than has been known for many ages. But the 
union of Germany and of Italy was desirable and possible 
because geographical conditions allowed it, while any 
real political union between the United States of America 
and the kingdom of Great Britain is a thing which geo- 
graphical conditions forbid. Still the German and Italian 
examples prove thus much, that men may belong to dif- 
ferent political societies, and yet may bear a common 
national name, and may feel for many purposes as mem- 
bers of one nation. But the real parallel is to be sought 
for in much earlier times. It is to be sought for among 
the people who of old time played in a narrower sphere 
the same part which we have played in a wider one. I 
must come back to a matter on which I said something 



58 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

in my first lecture. I then spoke of the true meaning 
of the word colony ; I maintained that, when the Thirteen 
States declared themselves to be free and independent, 
they did not thereby cease to be English colonies, but 
became English colonies in a truer sense. I illustrated 
that seeming paradox by the colonies of ancient Greece. 
Let me now carry out that illustration a little further. 

What the Greek of old was to the shores and islands 
and peninsulas of the Mediterranean, the Englishman of 
the last three centuries has been to the shores and islands 
and peninsulas of the Ocean and to boundless continents 
beyond them. Each crossed the sea in ships to win for 
himself a new land, and, wherever he won for himself a 
new land, he made that land a new Greece or a new Eng- 
land. In the language of ancient days, Greece, Hellas, 
was not a single land with a boundary to be diplomat- 
ically fixed. Wherever Greeks dwelled, they remained 
Greeks — Greeks by name, Greeks by feeling ; wherever 
they dwelled, they took Greece and the name of Greece 
with them. Wherever Hellenes dwelled, there was Hellas. 
Outlying spots in Africa, in Gaul, in Spain, on the fur- 
thest shores of the Euxine, high up among the isles of 
Dalmatia, were as truly parts of Greece, their people 
were as truly Greeks, as Athens, Sparta, and Argos, 
and the Greeks of those older cities. Men went forth 
to some distant land, and there they enlarged Hellas by 
a new city, a new member, a new independent member, 
of the common Hellenic body. The younger cities were 
as truly distinct and free political communities as the 
older ones ; the colony, independent from its birth, owed 
to its metropolis love and reverence, but it owed nothing 
more. From her child Syracuse the mother Corinth 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 59 

asked only love and reverence, and love and reverence 
she received in full measure. From her other child 
Korkyra she asked for something more than love and 
reverence, and bitter hatred and bloody wars were the 
fruits. So might it have been with us, if we had had the 
wisdom of the men of those old. cities — if we had not so 
long carried about with us that strange superstition 
which teaches that Englishmen who settle in distant 
lands, instead of forming free English communities from 
the beginning, must needs everywhere remain subjects 
of the sovereign of that part of the English people which 
has gone as far as the isle of Britain and no further. 
Thirteen — at least twelve — renowned homes of English- 
men along this eastern shore of your great continent 
might have been free and independent States, united by a 
federal bond, in the seventeenth century instead of in the 
eighteenth. You might have been from the beginning 
to your Corinth as another Syracuse ; you would not have 
been driven to be, for two unhappy moments — I trust 
never again to be since those two unhappy moments — 
as another Korkyra. Those moments I will pass by. I 
will deem of myself standing here as a man of Corinth 
speaking to men of Syracuse. I will deem of myself as 
speaking to men of the same stock, of the same speech, 
in a wide sense of the same nation — men sharing in the 
same history, the same memories, parted indeed into 
separate political bodies by the physical cause that we 
are parted by the great and wide Ocean, but none the 
less united by every tie that can make us in the highest 
sense one and the same people. So, in the teeth of dis- 
tance, of jealousies, of often cruel wars, each branch of 
the scattered folk of Hellas felt toward every other 



60 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

branch. So should every branch of the scattered folk of 
England feel toward every other branch. They, scat- 
tered and divided as they were, were still bound together 
by the common name of Hellenes. So should we, scat- 
tered indeed more widely than they were — for our world 
is a greater world than theirs was — but far less divided 
than they were in speech and history and feeling, be 
bound together by the common name of Englishmen. 

When then the Thirteen States declared themselves 
free and independent, they in truth became for the first 
time colonies of the elder England in the worthiest 
sense. By that act they rose to the level of the ancient 
settlements of Greece in other lands ; they rose to the 
level of Syracuse and Massalia — colonies, new settle- 
ments, children of full age enjoying the freedom of full 
age, peers of the mother-state, owing to the mother- 
state, not the forced obedience of a subject, but only the 
willing and kindly respect of a full-grown son to his 
father. By that act the people of those true English 
colonies, those free and independent States, did not 
cease to be Englishmen, but became Englishmen in a 
truer and a higher sense. By independence, and by in- 
dependence only, you, Englishmen in America, rose to 
the level of your fellow-Englishmen in Britain. And, if 
the same promotion should ever come to other settle- 
ments of Englishmen in distant lands, one of the many 
gains of such an event will be that it will enable the 
English of Britain and the English of America more 
fully to feel their common brotherhood. As long as 
there are only two independent English nations in the 
world, there is an unavoidable tendency to dwell on 
points of difference, perhaps even to call up points of 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 6 1 

jealousy. When there are three, four, five, independent 
English nations, we may fairly hope that such tenden- 
cies will die out, that they will be merged in the tend- 
ency to acknowledge the brotherhood which will bind 
together those three, four, or five nations, in distinction 
from all others. 

But as long as things remain as they are, if I speak of 
you as Americans, I mean the phrase to be elliptical ; 
I mean "American English " as distinguished from " Brit- 
ish English." And now let me again for a moment 
speak of myself, and tell you a story about myself. 
I was once taken to task by a publication on this side 
of the Ocean — not indeed in my own person, for the 
offence was done in an anonymous writing — for say- 
ing sportively that, in the mouth of a man of New 
England, the proper name for a man of Middle England 
was a " Britisher." I was thought by that saying to 
mean something offensive to the men of New England. 
No innocent man was ever more cruelly misconstrued. 
Instead of anything offensive, I meant all that was 
kindly, respectful, brotherly. I meant that you did 
right to call us by some name which, if it did not assert, 
at least did not deny, the common English brotherhood. 
Now, if you call yourselves " Americans," and call us 
"English" in opposition to "Americans," you do in effect 
disclaim the English name. You reproach us as it were 
with being the only English, while we wish to receive 
you as no less English than ourselves. But if you call 
us " Britishers," you allow, at least you do not shut out, 
all that I ask for. Perhaps the name " Britisher " does not 
sound very elegant, perhaps it does not exactly belong 
to the high-polite style ; but never mind that, if it is at 



62 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

least patient of the better sense which I wish to put 
upon it. If you call yourselves Americans and us 
" Britishers," I understand by " Britishers " Englishmen 
born and dwelling in Britain, as distinguished from 
Englishmen born and dwelling in America. I know 
a novel written long ago in Middle England, where an 
American merchant-captain is made to set down in his 
log, " Met a Britisher ; treated politely." The time, it 
should be noticed, was in the great war between Great 
Britain and France, when neutral vessels were not al- 
ways treated politely. Now you know better than I 
do whether such a captain was likely, then or now, 
really to set down in his log, " Met a Britisher ; treated 
politely." All that I say is, that, if he did so, I for one 
do not object to the name, but accept it as the name 
best describing the facts of the case. I will accept it till 
somebody better solves what is the real difficulty of the 
case. We need a substantive to match the adjective 
British. If " Britisher " is rejected as vulgar, " Briton " 
must be rejected as something worse, as distinctly inac- 
curate. In my own island I should greatly object to be 
called a Britisher, or even a Briton ; in Britain either 
name would be a mark of race between two races of 
men dwelling in the same island. But here in America 
we wish to distinguish, not between two races of men 
in the same land, but between men of the same race in 
two distant lands. The American, in short, is the 
American Englishman, the Britisher is the British Eng- 
lishman. I was called a Britisher the other day, and I 
did not feel angry. If the American editor who spoke 
of the little book which I mentioned as " foreign " will 
strike out that ugly word " foreign," and put instead 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 63 

" British," or even " Britisher," I will embrace him as 
an English brother. 

One word more of graver import. An event has 
lately happened — it has happened since I began to put 
pen to paper for the writing of the present lecture — 
which, sad in every other aspect, has been joyful in 
this, that it has brought the two great divisions of the 
English folk nearer together in heart and feeling. We 
have been made as one man by a common sorrow. It 
is not very long since the hearts of all the world were 
stirred by the tale of a great and illustrious monarch 
struck down by the murderer's hand in the streets of 
his own capital. That was the recompense for a life 
given for the good of his people ; that was the reward 
of the prince who had raised millions of his own sub- 
jects for the first time to the full rank of human beings 
— the prince who, while he set free the bondsman in his 
own realm, forgot not to set free the bondsmen of his 
own race beyond the bounds of his own realm. We 
mourned for Alexander the Liberator, liberator of 
Russia, liberator of Bulgaria, as it was fit to mourn for a 
noble man doomed to an unworthy fate. Since that day 
we have had to mourn again, to mourn for a man no 
less noble, cut down no less unworthily, cut down when 
he had just stretched forth his hand for a mighty 
and a noble work. And this time our mourning has 
been deeper. It has been deeper, because this time 
we have been mourning for one of our own selves ; we 
have been mourning for a brother ; we have been shar- 
ing in the mourning of brethren. We mourned for the 
man of our own blood as we could not mourn for the 



64 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

stranger. We could not mourn for an Emperor of all 
the Russias as we could mourn for the chosen leader 
of a mighty commonwealth of our own people. We 
could not mourn even for Alexander the Liberator as 
we could mourn for James Abram Garfield. All the 
signs of grief and kindred feeling, the people of one 
political body watching day by day for the least news 
of the welfare of the chief of another political body, 
watching as though they had been watching by the bed 
of a father or a brother — the breathless eagerness to 
hear of every turn for the better or for the worse — the 
prayers sent up from the temples of various forms of 
the common faith for a Christian brother and a Chris- 
tian ruler — the marks of sorrow when all was over, the 
sermons, the speeches, the muffled bells, the flags half- 
mast high, the telegraph-wires flashing messages of sym- 
pathy, the court of Britain in the unwonted garb of 
sorrow, — what does all this prove ? It proves indeed 
honour and sympathy for a noble man cruelly and foully 
wronged. But that we felt for the murdered Emperor 
no less than for the murdered President. This time it 
proves something more ; it proves that a President of 
the United States can be something to us Englishmen 
of Britain which an Emperor of all the Russias cannot 
be. We felt for one of ourselves ; I cannot say for a 
countryman — that geography forbids — but for a man 
of our own blood and our own speech. We could 
write over the grave of Garfield as we could not write 
over the grave of Alexander, " The man is near of kin 
to us." We felt, we mourned, for one who in himself 
deserved our sympathy and our sorrow ; but that sym- 
pathy and sorrow were all the keener because he who 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 6$ 

called them forth was a brother called to be the head 
of a commonwealth of brethren. We felt for the man 
in himself, but we felt yet more for the people who had 
freely placed their destinies in his hands. Surely never 
have Englishmen on either side of Ocean been more 
closely drawn together than they have now been drawn 
together in watching and in mourning beside the bed, 
over the grave, of the chief, the chosen chief, the worthy 
chief, of one of the two great divisions of the English 
people. 

I have gone thus far, not at all forgetting that all I have 
been saying goes on certain assumptions. In arguing 
that you, English-speaking dwellers in this western con- 
tinent, are, not less than we, English-speaking dwellers 
in what to you is an eastern island, are parts of one 
common English people, brethren of one common 
English family, I have throughout assumed that there 
is such a thing as a common English people, such a 
thing as a common English family. Now I am so 
used to controversies of all kinds that I shall not be 
greatly surprised if some one on either side of the 
Ocean should deny my assumption, and maintain that 
there is no English people at all. Some of us, I have 
often found occasion to notice, have a wonderful fancy 
for arguing that we are not ourselves, but somebody 
else. I know not a few who, so far from believing in 
an older English people on the European mainland — 
so far from believing in a younger English people on 
the American mainland — will hardly allow that there is 
an English people in the isle of Britain itself. At least 
they will not allow that the English people has had an 



66 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

unbroken being in the isle of Britain from its first 
coming into it till now. This is a peculiarly English 
fancy ; I know of no other people who have the same 
singular taste for turning their backs upon themselves. 
Other nations have rather a fancy for claiming more than 
their due ; the English alone — I suspect I may extend 
the remark to some on both sides of the Ocean — have 
this self-effacing zeal to claim less than rightly belongs 
to them. If I may have to persuade some here that 
their history did not begin in the seventeenth century, 
so I have to persuade some at home that their history did 
not begin in the thirteenth century or in the eleventh. 
The better to do this, I must ask both them and you to 
come back with me to the real beginning, the common 
beginning, of both of us in the fifth century. I am pre- 
pared to be told both, that you here are not strictly an 
English people, and that we in Britain are not strictly an 
English people. I am prepared to be told that, alike in 
America and in Britain, the Teutonic blood of the fifth 
century has been so mixed with other elements, that the 
nature and proportion of the mixture has been so differ- 
ent in the two cases, that, instead of one fairly homoge- 
neous race, we have become in truth two distinct mixed 
races. I shall be prepared to admit all the facts, so far 
as they are facts, on which this doctrine is grounded ; 
but I shall be also prepared to deal with those facts in 
quite another way. In one sense we are a mixed race, 
because, in one sense, every nation on the face of the 
earth is, and must be, a mixed race. And it is no less 
certain that this mixture has not taken exactly the same 
course in Britain and in America. But I am also pre- 
pared to maintain that we are not mixed in such a way 



THE ENGLISH NAME. 6j 

or to such a degree as to deny our national identity — that 
we are not so mixed, either in Britain or in America, as 
to make us some other people or some two other peoples, 
and not the one people that we were from the beginning. 
And I shall be prepared to argue another point. I shall 
not be surprised if some, either here or there, find a 
difficulty in admitting the analogy which I have assumed 
between what I call the first voyage and the second, 
between the process which colonized Britain in the fifth 
century and the process which colonized America in the 
seventeenth. Now I see the differences, many and great, 
as clearly as any man ; I only maintain that the like- 
nesses are yet more and greater. This evening I have 
had largely to speak of a name, but it has been of a 
name which is in truth no small fact. At our next meet- 
ing we will go on to look a little more narrowly into the 
facts which that name sets forth, the facts which show 
that I who speak and you who listen to me, I of the 
European island, you of the American mainland, are in 
truth brethren of one house, sharers in one heritage, the 
heritage of those bold colonists fourteen hundred years 
ago whose calling it was to change so large a part of 
Celtic Britain into Teutonic England. 



LECTURE III. 

©ije Jfir^t UDgage antr tfje fZtooita, 

Let me begin the present stage of our argument by 
stating as strongly as may be the manifest points of dif- 
ference between the colonization of Britain in the fifth 
and sixth centuries from the European mainland, and 
the colonization of America in the seventeenth century 
from the isle of Britain. Those differences, as I have 
already said, are neither few nor slight. The connexion 
between the English people in Britain and the English 
people in America is plain on the face of it. Everybody 
admits it ; it needs no proof. That the North American 
States were settled by English-speaking colonists from 
Britain, that those States proclaim to this day the mem- 
ory of the fact by keeping on the unbroken use of the 
English language, are points which I need not stop to 
make good by witnesses. I who speak and you who 
hear are ourselves the best witnesses to the fact. We 
exchange our thoughts without an interpreter ; we each 
speak to the other in our own tongue in which we were 
born. I need hardly take much time to answer some ar- 
guments — I am tempted to call them cavils — which I have 
known brought to prove that Britain and America have 
ceased to speak a common language. Some small differ- 
ences in accent, some small differences in vocabulary, 
are eagerly pressed into the service of this fallacy. I 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 69 

have been gravely told that "English" and "American 5 ' 
are two different languages because one speaks of a 
" shop " and the other of a " store," because one speaks 
of a " railway-carriage " and the other of a " railroad-car." 
Now people who talk in this way cannot know the real 
nature of differences of language, or even of differences 
of dialect. Differences of this kind are not differences 
of language ; they are not even differences of dialect. 
They are merely differences of local custom, often to be 
easily accounted for by differences of local circumstances. 
I have not the slightest doubt that a " store " in a newly- 
founded New England town differed a good deal from a 
" shop " in an old-standing town in the older England. 
It was likely to have, far more than the other had, the 
nature of a store in the strict sense ; it was doubtless 
called a " store " because that was the name which best 
expressed what it was. I could myself greatly enlarge 
the list by words which I have myself heard since I 
came into America, but I have heard no difference of 
language, no difference of dialect. I can mark differ- 
ences of dialect between different parts of the United 
States, as I can mark differences of dialect between dif- 
ferent parts of England ; but a general American dia- 
lect of English, as distinguished from a general British 
dialect of English, I have not marked. I have indeed 
marked a good many differences of local usage, not a 
few of which are good seventeenth-century words and 
uses of words which lived on here after they were 
dropped in Britain. I have heard one word only that 
did not at once convey its meaning. The word " rare," 
applied to meat not cooked enough, did sound really 
strange to me ; but an eminent citizen of yours pres- 



JO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

ently showed me that it had for it the authority of 
Dryden. And a neighbour of my own at home pres- 
ently wrote to rebuke me for not knowing a word which 
was in daily use in the county of Somerset. But the 
attempt to prove difference of language from simple dif- 
ference of local use proves too much. That kind of 
argument might be just as easily turned to show that 
there are half a dozen or more languages spoken in the 
elder England itself. A hackney-carriage is, or lately 
was, best known in London as a cab, in Birmingham as 
a car, in Manchester as a coach, and in most other places 
as a fly. I do not doubt that there is a real reason for 
every one of these small differences of usage ; at any 
rate, there is something that savours of poetry or meta- 
phor in the fly, and something that savours of slang in 
the cab. Or again, I remember a foolish man in 
England publishing his travels in America, and set- 
ting down as " Americanisms " the use of such words 
as "fall" and "bottom." I wonder whether he thought 
that " fall " and " bottom " were " American " words 
invented since the Declaration of Independence, which 
have taken the place of " English " words — perhaps Latin 
" autumn " and " valley " — which were in use before that 
event. Now I might very well question the fact whether 
" fall " and " bottom " are in any way distinctive of Amer- 
ica. " Bottom," in much the same sense as " dale " or 
" combe," lives both in local nomenclature and in our 
common translation of the Bible ; and if " fall," as a sea- 
son of the year, has gone out of use in Britain, it has 
gone out very lately. At least, I perfectly well remem- 
ber the phrase of "spring and fall" in my childhood. 
But I grant that, if there be this difference in the use of 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. J I 

words like " fall " and " bottom," it does come a degree 
nearer to the real difference of language or dialect than 
differences in the use of words like " store " and " car." 
" Fall " and " bottom " are words which belong to the 
very essence of the language. We must, from the very- 
beginning of things, have some names for the seasons 
of the year and for the marked features of nature. If 
it could be shown that we do habitually call the mass of 
objects of this kind by different names, it would go some 
way toward proving a difference of language, or at least 
of vocabulary. But even then it would not go very far, 
unless the names used on each side were names which 
were altogether unintelligible on the other side. If sun, 
moon, and stars, earth, air, fire, and water, father and 
mother, son and daughter, brother and sister, ever come 
to be habitually called on one side of the Ocean by 
names which are not understood on the other side, 
then I shall allow that there is an English and an 
American language distinct from one another, but not 
till then. 

A statesman in England, lately deceased, once spoke 
of the United States as a country which had borrowed 
its language and several other things from another 
country. What did he think that you, men of New 
England, were ? It is hardly possible that he looked 
on the people of the United States as Red Indians who 
had learned English. Yet his words, taken literally, 
could hardly bear any other meaning. Truly there is 
no borrowing in the case : you did not borrow from 
us any more than we borrowed from you. Each divi- 
sion of the English folk, each on its own side of the 
Ocean, kept the possession which was common to both 



72 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. - 

of equal right, and, as not the least precious part of 
that common possession, each kept the old Teutonic 
mother-tongue. Men who speak different languages 
need an interpreter; men who speak different dialects 
of the same language often understand one another 
with difficulty, but there is commonly some interme- 
diate form of the common tongue which they both 
understand with ease. But we, Englishmen of the two 
sides of the Ocean, are not driven to any shifts like 
these in holding converse with one another. We speak 
the same tongue, with the same grammatical forms, 
the same essential vocabulary. We have a common 
possession in the older literature of the common tongue, 
older than the days of separation. And we have a com- 
mon possession too in the literature which since the 
separation has grown up on the two sides of the Ocean. 
English books are read in America, American books 
are read in England, not as books belonging to a for- 
eign literature, but as parts of a literature which is 
equally at home in both lands. Between good writ- 
ing and speaking in England and good writing and 
speaking in America, there is, I maintain, no differ- 
ence whatever in point of language, strictly so called. 
That there should be a certain local flavour about each, 
a certain style and taste and manner, which may show 
to which side of the Ocean the writer or speaker be- 
longs, is in no way wonderful, in no way matter of 
blame on either side. But differences of this kind are 
not real differences of language. Nor is it at all won- 
derful if bad writers in England and bad writers in 
America should sometimes be bad with different and 
characteristic kinds of badness. That proves nothing 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 73 

for the present argument ; it proves no more than the 
doctrine which was old in the days of Aristotle, that 
there is only one way of being right, but that there are 
many ways of being wrong. The truth that there is 
not even a dialectic difference between the tongue of 
Middle England and the tongue of New England may 
better come home to you if you compare the case of 
British and American English with a case of real dia- 
lectic difference. Take the case of the Northern and 
Southern types of English within Britain itself. In the 
last century — it may even have been so within the pres- 
ent century — a literary Scotsman habitually used two 
dialects of the same tongue. He spoke his own nat- 
ural tongue, the Northern form of English, a much 
truer and purer form of English than the Southern 
English which we speak. But he wrote, or tried to 
write, Southern English, according to the received 
models of Southern English. And this he did con- 
sciously, giving his mind of set purpose to eschew the 
peculiarities of his own natural dialect, and to employ 
in their stead the peculiarities of the dialect which 
formed his literary ideal. I will not insult you by sup- 
posing that a good American writer has any need to do 
anything of this kind. He has no need to imitate the 
English of Britain ; he has simply to write in its purity 
the common language of Britain and America. To that 
end he will eschew all forms of speech which depart 
from that purity, whether they are of British or of Amer- 
ican origin. But he has no need to eschew any forms 
simply as being American, or to adopt any forms simply 
as being British. He has simply to write the common 
speech, adopting whatever is good, eschewing whatever 



74 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

is bad, from whichever side of Ocean the good and the 
bad may come. 

Now, after comparing New England and Middle 
England in this matter, let us go back and compare 
Middle England and Old England. We shall now find 
another state of things. Allow me again to take in 
under the name of Old England, not merely the older 
Angeln or the older Saxony, but the whole Nether- 
Dutch-speaking coast of the European continent. Any- 
where in that region, if I choose to say that the tongue 
is the same as the tongue of Middle and New England, 
I shall be saying what is perfectly true in a certain 
sense. But it will not be true in the same sense as that 
in which I say that the tongue of Middle and of New 
England is the same. The truth of this last proposition 
is not a matter of any special learning ; it is not a kind 
of inner doctrine taken in by those only who are masters 
of some special learning : it is a matter of every-day 
experience about which every man's common sense 
can judge. But if I say that the tongue of Angeln, or 
of the Old Saxony, or of Friesland, Holland, and Flan- 
ders, is the same as the English tongue common to 
Britain and America, I am saying what is perfectly true 
as a matter of learned inquiry, but what is not true as 
a matter of every-day experience. The common tongue 
of Britain and America is not practically intelligible 
in those Nether-Dutch lands, and the speech of those 
Nether-Dutch lands is not practically intelligible in 
Britain and America. I say not practically intelligible ; 
I do not say that they are utterly unintelligible to one 
another, like two tongues which have no kindred 
between them at all, or no nearer kindred than is 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 75 

implied in common Aryan origin. The philologer re- 
cognizes the near kindred at a glance, and there are a 
crowd of stories which show that the likeness between 
the tongues strikes even those who are not philologers. 
One constantly hears stories how an Englishman in 
Flanders or Holland, or even in Denmark, contrived, 
while speaking his own tongue, to make himself under- 
stood by the men of the land. But tales like these are 
always told as something remarkable, something which 
we are expected to be rather surprised at hearing. The 
truth is that the Nether-Dutch of the European mainland 
and the Nether-Dutch — that is, the English — of Britain 
and America have long ceased to be mutually intelligi- 
ble, but that they can again become mutually intelligible 
under certain circumstances. I can believe that it may 
happen through happy accident. I can believe the story 
of the Englishman in Holland — how he wanted warm 
water — how he found that, when he asked over and 
over again for emi chaude, nothing came of it — how 
he at last cried out "warm water" in a kind of despair, 
and then the thing that he wanted was at once brought 
to him. I know by experience that, in the city of Ham- 
burg, where, though the polite and literary speech is 
High-Dutch, the natural speech of the people is 
Nether-Dutch, if you speak English slowly and care- 
fully, choosing your words well and uttering them 
distinctly, you will be understood by a common man 
in the streets of the Hanseatic city. But you will not — 
at least I did not — understand what our Nether-Dutch 
kinsman says back again, because he will not pick his 
words carefully or utter them slowly. Practically there- 
fore the two languages are no longer one. Practically 



?6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

they have become two languages. They have passed 
the stage of dialectic difference. They are for practical 
purposes mutually unintelligible, and there is no third 
or intermediate form of speech which is intelligible to 
both. The tongues have no common literature. He 
who speaks one of them by nature, and wishes to read 
books in the other, must learn that other tongue as a 
foreign language. The unity of speech between Middle 
England and New is an unity of every-day usage which 
every man can feel and understand. The unity of speech 
between Old England and Middle is merely an unity of 
philological curiosity which it needs special teaching to 
feel and understand. 

I might carry on this same kind of contrast through 
many points of detail, the result of all of which would 
be to show in the same way that there has been for ages 
a division between the English in Britain and their near- 
est kinsfolk on the European continent of quite another 
kind from the division which parts the English in Amer- 
ica from the English in Britain. This wide difference is 
owing to the widely different circumstances uSoer which 
the earlier and the later colony was founded. First of 
all, the settlement of the English in Britain took place 
fourteen hundred years ago ; the settlement of the Eng- 
lish in America took place less than three hundred years 
ago. It is only natural, from a mere reckoning of years, 
that the earlier colony should have parted off much 
more widely from the metropolis than the later colony 
has done. But the mere reckoning of years is not all ; it 
might so happen that three hundred years should work 
a greater amount of change than fourteen hundred. The 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. J? 

real cause is to be found, not so much in the mere dif- 
ference in the number of years as in the fact that the 
later settlement was the work of a nation which had 
long been fully formed, while the earlier settlement was 
the work of a people whose national being was not yet 
fully formed, or, rather, whose national being derived 
its fully developed shape from the fact of the settlement 
itself. At the time of the English settlement in Britain, 
the consciousness of distinct national life could hardly 
have begun among the Nether-Dutch people ; their lan- 
guage, their institutions, were still only forming, not yet 
formed ; their literature, if it had begun, was still only a 
literature of traditional poems, and it was presently to 
receive a deadly blow through the teaching of Christian- 
ity. A part of this young and unformed people parted 
off from the general mass to occupy seats in a new land. 
The colonists who were thus parted from their mother- 
land did not forget whence they had come ; but, in the 
nature of things, they could not keep up the same con- 
nexion with that motherland which the colonists of the 
seventeenth century, no less naturally, did keep up with 
theirs. And to the simple minds of the fifth and sixth 
centuries the thought never suggested itself that Angles 
and Saxons who left the mainland to settle in Britain 
owed any political allegiance to the old Angeln or the 
old Saxony on the mainland. 

But nothing tended so greatly to part off the earlier 
settlers from their motherland as the nature of the land 
in which they made their settlement. Their colonies 
were planted in Britain ; that is, in an island, in a great 
island, an island which was traditionally looked on as 
another world. There is no fact in the whole history of 

6 



78 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

our people more important than the fact that our first 
great settlement was made in an island. No migration 
to any other part of the continent could have had the 
same consequences as our migration from the continent 
to the isle of Britain. At an early stage of our national 
life, we planted ourselves in a new world, carrying with 
us our infant tongue, our infant institutions, all the ele- 
ments out of which national life grows. In that new 
world they grew up to their first perfection. The Eng- 
lish of Britain first became a nation within the four seas 
of Britain. Our insular position determined our history 
and determined our national character. All the cir- 
cumstances of their later history tended to separate 
the insular and the continental branches of the Ne- 
ther-Dutch stock. The insular Teutons, settling in an 
island from which Roman rule had passed away, and 
who had to make and to defend their settlement by long 
wars against a stubborn and restless enemy, lived quite 
another historic life from any of their fellows. Their po- 
sition was equally unlike that of the Teutons who abode 
on Teutonic soil and that of the Teutons who made far 
easier settlements in the provinces of the Roman Empire. 
In their island world the English lived on, severed from 
their continental kinsfolk and placed out of reach of the 
chief influences which affected them. They grew up 
apart, remaining in many things more strictly Teutonic 
than their continental kinsfolk, needing a twofold con- 
quest, spiritual and temporal, to bring them in any mea- 
sure within the verge of the Latin world of Europe. 
And, when the Romance influence came upon England, 
it came in a shape in which it never affected any other 
of the kindred lands. For it came in the form of a con- 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 79 

quest, but a conquest of so peculiar a character that in 
the end it rather strengthened the national life than 
weakened it. The English of Britain, in short, were 
parted at so early a stage from the English of the con- 
tinent that their history took a wholly distinct course. 
They grew up as a wholly distinct people, keeping up 
a constant intercourse with some of the kindred nations, 
but only the intercourse of strangers and foreigners, of 
men of another nation and another speech. 

In opposition to all this, the second migration of the 
English folk, the migration which made a large part of the 
North American continent an English land, was made 
when the English nation was in every sense fully 
formed, when its language, its literature, its institutions, 
had put on their distinct and characteristic shapes. 
There was no need for a new nation to be formed out of 
as yet unformed elements ; there was no need for new 
institutions to be developed out of unformed germs ; 
there was at most an existing nation to undergo a geo 
graphical and political cleaving asunder, but with no 
further change than was involved in that geographical 
and political cleaving asunder. The English settlers in 
America did not, according to the strange delusion of the 
statesman whom I quoted some time back, borrow the 
laws, language, and institutions of some other country ; 
they took with them, ready made, from their old to their 
new country, their own laws, language, and institutions, 
which were equally their own in the old country and in 
the new. Some things doubtless needed to be changed 
by reason of the mere change from an island in the old 
world to a continent in the new ; some things again 
needed to be modified when the colonies of England be- 



SO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

came more truly colonies of England by independence. 
But all such changes were in truth reforms of an old fab- 
ric, not the creation of a new fabric. The work was already 
done; the fabric was already reared ; the English nation 
had been formed and had waxed to its full growth on 
British soil ; there was no need, no possibility, that an- 
other nation in the same sense, or in any sense but the 
strictly political sense, should grow up on American 
soil. The old tongue, the old memories, the old life, 
lived on in both the divided branches of the English 
nation. There could not be, the facts of history would 
not allow that there should be, the same amount of 
change, the same amount of separation, between the 
second England and the third as the facts of earlier 
history had wrought between the first England and 
the second. 

And yet there are not lacking some points of direct 
likeness between the older and the later settlements. 
I have spoken of the insular position of the English in 
Britain as having had no small effect on their history 
and national character. Shall you be surprised if I say 
that a position not wholly unlike in some respects has 
had no small effect on the history and national charac- 
ter of the English in America ? Looking on the map, 
on the vast extent of the North American continent, 
and considering further how few, compared with some 
other parts both of the old and the new world, are the 
islands of any size which lie along your coasts, I can 
hardly call the United States an insular power. But I 
shall hardly be wrong in calling them an isolated power. 
You live in a world of your own, as the English did 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 8 1 

when they first left the continent for the great island. 
You are as distinctly the first power in your own world 
as the elder English were the first power in their own 
world. And if we overleap mere political boundaries, — 
if we take in all the English-speaking inhabitants of 
North America, both in the lands which have become 
truly a new England and in the lands which still lag be- 
hind that standard — North America is so pre-eminently 
an English land that its other inhabitants, whether rem- 
nants of earlier races or settlers from other parts of the 
old world, seem something exceptional beside its Eng- 
lish-speaking people. So it was in the isle of Britain 
itself. The kingdom of England — after the union of 
many small kingdoms and principalities had formed the 
kingdom of England — was not the only English power 
in the isle of Britain. The kingdom of Scotland, often 
politically the enemy of England, was still practically 
an English kingdom ; among the three elements in the 
population of Scotland, it was its English element, the 
men of Teutonic Lothian, that made Scotland all that it 
historically became. In measuring Teutonic settlement 
and Teutonic influence in Britain, we must take into our 
reckoning, not only the kingdom of England politically 
so called, but also the dominant English element in Scot- 
land. And, taking in the two, the Teuton becomes dis- 
tinctly dominant throughout the island ; the Celt is 
something exceptional. Thus, alike in the European 
island and in the American continent, the English 
settlers were predominant in a world of their own. In 
both they were dominant ; in both they were isolated. 
Neither had, like the nations of continental Europe, 
powers of equal rank, but foreign in every sense of the 



82 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

word, close on their borders. Neither has ever known 
the experience of lands like France, Germany, and Italy, 
which have had to live with other great nations, alien 
and rival nations, marching on them through a long 
frontier. The English people, both in Britain and in 
America, would most likely have been in some things 
a different kind of people if they had gone through 
that experience. And if our Nether-Dutch kinsfolk 
on the European mainland have not gone through 
altogether the same experience as France, Germany, or 
Italy, it has been from a cause exactly opposite to those 
which affected us in Britain and in America. Their 
fate was ruled, not by isolation, but by lack of isolation. 
They have had too many neighbours, and neighbours 
often too strong for them. In the long line of their 
coast, some of them passed under the rule of France 
and some under the rule of Denmark. The greater 
part has been merged in the closely-allied, but still 
quite distinct, speech and nationality of the High- 
German. On the whole continent of Europe there is 
left only one independent land wholly and avowedly 
of the Nether-Dutch speech and kin. That land is 
one with which Englishmen both in Europe and 
in America have had much to do both in war and in 
peace. We sent them Wilfrith to preach to them the 
faith and Sidney to die for their freedom. And they 
sent us William of Orange, if not to die, yet to live for 
ours. And, on this side of the Ocean, as I have already 
pointed out, they were the original settlers of the great- 
est city and of one of the greatest States of your Union. 
The truest representative of the oldest England on the 
European continent is the modern kingdom of the Neth- 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 83 

erlands, once famous by the more glorious name of the 
Seven United Provinces. 

I have sometimes been asked, in a kind of mockery, 
whether I should wish the history of England or the 
language of England to have been the same as the 
history and the language of the Netherlands. The ques- 
tion is commonly put with reference to the effects of 
the Romance element in England — above all, to the 
effects of the Norman Conquest. If there had been no 
Norman Conquest, or if Romance influences had not 
made their way into England in some other shape, Eng- 
land, we are told — and therefore, remember, America too 
— would have been no more in the world than the Neth- 
erlands have been. Our tongue would have been no 
more harmonious, our literature would have been no 
greater, than the one independent Nether-Dutch lan- 
guage and literature now to be found on the mainland 
of Europe. Now this kind of comparison savours a little 
of that kind of condescending benevolence toward the 
rest of the world of which I remember a good instance 
in a child's story. A child points out to his mother that 
a man who is passing by is a Frenchman. The mother 
answers, " Yes, poor man ; but he can't help it." I do not 
suppose that any of us here, from whichever side of the 
Ocean, would wish to change either with the Frenchman 
or with the Hollander. But I do not know that that 
proves of itself any inherent superiority on our part over 
the Frenchman or the Hollander. It is quite possible that 
he would be just as unwilling to change with any of us, 
and we should not like the inference that might thence 
be drawn the other way. I certainly think — and you, 



84 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

countrymen of Motley, may be inclined to think with 
me — that the history of the Netherlands is not quite so 
contemptible as the question which I have quoted seems 
to imply. Still I freely allow that I should not wish to 
exchange the history of England for the history of the 
Netherlands. But I should be neither offended nor as- 
tonished if the Hollander proved just as little willing to 
exchange his national history for mine. About the lan- 
guage I cannot speak so freely. I know next to nothing 
of the language, and nothing at all of the literature. 
My very small dabblings in continental Nether-Dutch 
have been made in other dialects of the common tongue. 
But I believe the popular notion is that the Nether-Dutch 
of Holland and the other six provinces is a grotesque 
kind of language, something like English, something 
like German, but not exactly like either, and that it is 
to be looked on as something queer and outlandish, 
because it is not exactly like either. Now I cannot 
admit that every Teutonic language is necessarily bound 
to conform to one or other of two types, English and 
High-German. The tongue of Holland may surely have 
struck out a line of its own, and it may be just as good 
in its own line as the tongues of the two greater coun- 
tries on each side of it. As for the literature, it is not 
in the nature of things that the literature of the Seven 
Provinces should hold the same place in the world's 
esteem as the literature of England or France, of Ger- 
many or Italy. He who speaks in the tongue of Hol- 
land does not speak to the same vast audience of men 
of his own tongue as he does who speaks the tongue of 
England ; still less does he speak to the same audience 
of men of tongues not his own as he does who speaks 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 85 

the tongue of France. He thereby loses one great 
incitement to excellence ; he knows that it is only with- 
in a very narrow range that he can be listened to. But 
why may not a poet, an orator, or an historian, in the 
Nether-Dutch tongue of Holland, in himself and for 
his own people, be as good a poet, orator, or historian, 
as if he wrote in English or French or High-German ? 
I will not here enter on the question of the good or bad 
effect of the Romance infusion into our language. But 
the analogy of other tongues seems to show that a 
state on the scale of England would in any case, with 
or without any alien infusion, have developed for itself 
a literature on a different scale, so to speak, from the 
literature of the Seven Provinces. And this at least I 
know, that there is nothing grotesque or contemptible, 
nothing unworthy of being the vehicle of the very 
greatest literature, in the tongue of England before the 
Romance infusion made its way into it. Have we not 
our Homer after Homer in the heroic lay of Beowulf? 
Have we not our Milton before Milton in the sacred 
song of Caedmon ? 

But all this is not the real answer to such questions 
as whether England, left to her own Teutonic being, 
without any Romance elements brought in by conquer- 
ors or others, would not have been as Holland now is. 
Now if it is ruled to be so specially sad a fate to be as 
Holland, I admit, as fully as my questioner can wish to 
imply, that the greatest case of Romance influence in 
England, the Norman Conquest of England, effectually 
saved us from being as Holland. I fully admit, in the 
words of Gibbon, that England was a gainer by the 
Norman Conquest. But I must be allowed to put my 



86 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

own meaning on Gibbon's words. What that meaning 
is I hope to show hereafter. I will here only state my 
paradox. I believe that we have been, in the long run, 
more Teutonic, more truly English, than if Romance- 
speaking invaders had left us to ourselves. I believe 
that it is largely owing to the Norman Conquest that 
we, on both sides of Ocean, may fairly boast ourselves 
as a greater and truer representative of the old Nether- 
Dutch stock than any nation now left on the European 
mainland. That doctrine, that paradox, I have main- 
tained in five large volumes ; I have also maintained it 
in one very small volume indeed. 

But the question, captious as it is, at least assumes my 
main point. It assumes that the English people is a Teu- 
tonic people, a Nether-Dutch people, a kindred people 
with the men of Holland and with all other men of the 
Nether-Dutch stock on the European mainland. It is 
strange that one should have to argue such a point as 
this, that one should have to go about to prove that we 
are ourselves and not somebody else. But there are so 
many odd confusions about in the world that it may be 
needful, for the ten thousandth time, to say something 
about this matter also. I may not unlikely be told — it 
will be very far from the first time, if I am — that we 
are not ourselves, that we are hardly so much as some- 
body else, that we are, in truth, nobody in particular ; 
in other words, that we are a mixed race. Now in 
a certain sense this is true ; all races are mixed ; no 
nation in the world ever was, or ever will be, or ever 
can be, of absolutely pure descent ; there is none which 
does not number some members, many members, who 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 87 

do not come of the original stock by blood, but who 
belong to it only by the law of adoption. If we wish 
to establish the purity of descent of any people by that 
kind of physical proof which would satisfy the physi- 
ologist, or that kind of legal proof which would satisfy 
the genealogist, we shall not find it in the case of the 
English people ; but then we shall not find it in the case 
of any other people. If this kind of proof is needed, 
we may give up talking about races and nations alto- 
gether; we may give up all national feelings, all national 
pride, all national traditions. But, if we admit the law 
of adoption, all becomes clear. Here is a certain col- 
lection of men called a nation, presumably — for we can 
get no further — of kindred blood in the first instance. 
The nation is marked off by the common marks of a 
nation, above all by the possession of a common lan- 
guage. In process of time this society admits, one by 
one, or at all events in numbers which bear no proportion 
to its own, certain adoptive members. They come in, 
possibly by adoption in the strictest sense, perhaps by 
conquest, perhaps by migration. And the conquest may 
be either conquest wrought or conquest undergone ; 
migration too, like conquest, may happen either way — 
that is, the nation may adopt some members from the 
people in whose land it settles, and it may adopt other 
members from among those who at a later stage settle in 
its land. Such adoptive members are adopted in the sense 
of the old Roman law of adoption, when a Roman citi- 
zen chose to himself a son out of another Roman gens. 
They become for all practical purposes part of the nation ; 
they accept its language, its feelings, its traditions ; in a 
generation or two they are lost in its general mass ; they 



88 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

become undistinguishable in any way from the hered- 
itary members of the body into which they are adopted. 
If such adoption as this is held to destroy the purity of 
a nation, then it is no use talking about nations at all. 
Every nation has gone through the processes of which we 
have just spoken in a greater or less degree. And the 
greater part the nation has played in the general affairs 
of the world, the more largely its history has affected the 
history of any other nations, the more largely will it be 
found to have gone through them. Absolute purity of 
blood, I repeat, will be found nowhere ; but the nearest 
approaches to it must be looked for among those nations 
which have played the least figure in history, those which 
have moved least, those which have had least effect on the 
history of other nations. The Basques must be a nearly 
unmixed people; so must those Albanians who have 
not migrated into Greece ; so, I should think, must have 
been the old Prussians, till the Teutonic Knights ate 
them up. Among nations of higher historic fame, the 
Norwegians must have received a smaller infusion of 
foreign blood than most other European nations, simply 
because, for a good many centuries past, they have played 
only a secondary part in Europe. And, judged by this 
standard, the English must certainly rank among the more 
mixed nations ; we cannot claim the approximate purity 
of Basques and Albanians. All the various forms of 
adoption have been largely practised and largely under- 
gone by the English people — some in their third home, 
some in their second, some, I do not doubt, in their 
first home also. In this sense we must plead guilty to 
being a mixed race ; we must admit the crime, if crime 
it be, of having on both sides of the Ocean turned many 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 89 

men into Englishmen who were not Englishmen by nat- 
ural descent. 

But we may now fairly ask whether we are more 
mixed than those other nations of Europe who have 
played an equal part in general history. Let us 
compare ourselves with two of the foremost. We 
cannot take a place alongside of the Basques and 
the Albanians ; let us see how we stand alongside of 
the Germans and the French. I assert fearlessly that 
we are not more mixed than the Germans, and that 
we are a great deal less mixed than the French. If 
this last fact is held to prove that the French are a 
greater people than either Germans or English, then the 
Frenchman in my child's story is avenged : the Germans 
and the English, poor fellows, cannot help it. We are 
told that the English are not a pure Teutonic people, 
because, in the course of the conquest of Britain, they 
must have assimilated many men of British, some per- 
haps of Roman, blood. But look at the map of Ger- 
many. Look at it in the fourth century, when the Ger- 
man lands west of the Rhine and south of the Danube are 
still thick with Roman cities. Did no Roman blood, no 
Celtic blood, no blood of the earlier inhabitants, who- 
ever they may have been, find its way into the veins of 
the Teutonic conquerors who won or won back those 
lands for Germany ? Look again to the east in the days 
of Charles the Great and later still. See all the lands 
east of the Elbe, and some to the west of it, occupied 
by the Slavonic nations. To this day there are large 
districts within the German Empire whose speech is 
still Slavonic, and German-speaking lands are still 
ruled by dukes who can trace up an undoubted pedi- 



90 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

gree to old Slavonic kings. And the Prussians too, 
whose name so large a part of Germany has consented 
to take, surely some of them must have been Teuton- 
ized ; they cannot every one have been devoured. No 
one, I think, can doubt that the amount of Slavonic 
) blood among the modern Germans must be far greater 
than the amount of Celtic blood among the modern 
English in Britain and America. Yet, in the teeth of all 
this, the Germans are Germans ; they are, for all essential 
and practical purposes, a Teutonic people. Celts, Slaves, 
Prussians, have become Germans ; the Germans have 
not become Celts or Slaves, or, in anything but name, 
Prussians. And within the Teutonic pale, crowds of 
men of our own immediate branch of the great stock, 
men of the Nether-Dutch stock —Englishmen, that is, 
who stayed behind — have, for all practical purposes, 
passed over from the Nether-Dutch stock to the High. 
But as the modern Germans, notwithstanding admix- 
ture from outside, are still a Teutonic people, so, not- 
withstanding admixture from inside, they are still a 
High-German people. And, if we have thus to speak 
of Germany, what shall we say of France ? Surely that 
very eminent German writer who called the French a mixed 
folk — a Mischvolk — in a very special sense said no more 
than the truth. Here is a people of whom we see at the 
first glance that their name comes from one source and 
their tongue from another, while their blood must come 
mainly from a third source or from many other sources. 
The people of Gaul have learned the tongue of one set 
of conquerors ; they have taken the name of another. 
Save in a few corners, the whole land has adopted the 
tongue of the Roman, and the land and its folk alike 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 9 1 

have taken the name of the Teutonic Frank. But the 
great mass of the French people must spring, neither 
from Franks nor from Romans, but from those who 
were in the land before Franks or Romans came into 
it. And who were they? Celts, we may be sure, in the 
greater part of the land, but by no means in all. South 
of the Loire, still more south of the Garonne, we are in 
lands which have absolutely nothing in common with 
the northern parts of Gaul, except the facts that they 
were united under Roman rule and that they have been 
united again, in later times. In northern Gaul the peo- 
ple must be mainly Celts, with a considerable infusion 
of Frankish bloocl ; in southern Gaul they must be 
largely Iberians, Ligurians, other nations who are neither 
Celtic, Roman, nor Teutonic, with a much slighter infu- 
sion of Gothic and Burgundian blood. Add again Teu- 
tonic infusions of other kinds — add the Germans who in 
Caesar's day were already on the left bank of the Rhine, 
the Nether-Dutch settlements which once pressed far to 
the south of all that for some ages has been called Flan- 
ders, the Saxon settlements in various parts of north- 
ern Gaul, and the greater Scandinavian settlement which 
grew into the duchy of Normandy, — all this gives us a 
picture of a mixture of blood which I must think far 
surpasses anything to be found in either England or 
Germany. I believe that the French are, even as a mat- 
ter of blood, far more mixed, far more truly to be called 
a Mischvolk, than either the Germans or the English. 
I am certain that the name is more truly to be applied 
to them in another sense which concerns me more. 

Let us start again from our doctrine that, while some 
nations come nearer to purity of blood than others, 



92 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

none is of absolutely pure blood, that all have, in a 
greater or less degree, been recruited by adoption. 
Now on adoption follows assimilation. The adopted 
members of the family conform to the standard of the 
hereditary members. I am far from saying that the 
presence of the adopted members exercises no influence 
on the body into which they are adopted ; but the body 
into which they are adopted exercises an incalculably 
greater influence on them. They are incorporated, man 
by man, company by company, into a greater pre- 
existing body, by which they are absorbed. But that 
pre-existing body may have been formed in different 
ways. In our days and for some centuries back, no 
nation in Europe has had a more distinct national being 
and national character than the French. And it has had 
also a most remarkable power of attraction ; lands 
inhabited by men of other races and other tongues have 
been largely contented to merge themselves in France. 
This tendency has doubtless helped to make the French 
yet more of a Misclivolk than before ; but the body into 
which Provence and Franche Comte and Elsass and 
Savoy have in different ages been incorporated, was a 
Mischvolk already. When strictly French history begins 
in the tenth century, we already see a nation whose 
national being is made up of three elements. As a 
matter of descent, it must have been more Celtic than 
anything else. As a matter of language, it was Roman. 
French is essentially a Latin tongue; it contains -a Teu- 
tonic infusion far greater than might be thought at first 
sight, but it contains no Celtic infusion worth speaking 
of, nor does the Teutonic infusion interfere with the 
essentially Latin character of the language. As a mat- 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 93 

ter of national name, as a matter of political history, 
this same body is Teutonic. France is historically one 
of the powers which arose out of the break-up of the 
great Teutonic dominion of the Franks. It is one of 
those two parts of that dominion in which the Frankish 
name lived on. The later annexations of France were 
thus incorporated into a body which had been formed 
out of mingled elements, a body which may be called by 
different names according to the point of view from 
which it is looked at — a body which the ethnologer 
proper would most likely call mainly Celtic, which the 
philologer proper must call Latin, which the strictly 
political historian can call nothing but Teutonic. The 
people of the lands which were annexed by France in 
later times did not become either Celts or Romans or 
Teutons ; they were merged in that compound essence 
which had been formed by the mixture of Celtic, Roman, 
and Teutonic elements ; they became Frenchmen. 

The point on which I have been insisting in this last 
stage of my argument is that, in the case of the French 
people, the adopting and assimilating body itself is a 
compound body formed out of several elements. We 
cannot say that the assimilating body was itself formed 
by assimilation ; it was formed by another process. The 
Romans did no doubt largely assimilate the Celts and 
and other original inhabitants of Gaul ; but we cannot 
say that these artificial Romans either assimilated their 
Teutonic conquerors or were assimilated by them. We 
cannot say either that they absorbed the Franks or that 
they were absorbed by them. In short, the three elements 
in Gaul, the three elements which go to make up the 
modern French nationality, have been fused together 



94 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

without assimilation. The result is a fourth thing, differ- 
ent from any of the three. We cannot even say that any 
one of the three elements is dominant. Not one has 
given its own prevailing character to the whole. Any 
one of the three may be said to be dominant, according 
to the point of view from which the whole is looked at. 
Now I maintain that this process by which the French 
people was formed, as it has nothing answering to it in 
the case of the German people, has nothing answering 
to it in the case of the English. With regard to the 
German people, it is hardly needful to carry on the argu- 
ment any further. With them we may take the position 
for granted ; the tendency of error is rather to look on the 
German nation as being less mixed than it is. Having 
brought in other nations by way only of illustration, let 
us go on with ourselves. I maintain that we are not a 
Mischvolk like the French. I hold that, though we have 
largely practised the law of adoption, though we have, 
on both sides of the Ocean, adopted many who were not 
our own by birth, though we may have been to some ex- 
tent modified by those whom we adopted, yet the adopt- 
ing and assimilating body has been itself a distinct unity, 
not a compound body like that union of Celtic, Roman, 
and Teutonic elements which formed the French people. 
I maintain that, though we have received several infu- 
sions from outside, yet there are no co-ordinate elements 
in the kernel of our nationality, in the body which adopts 
and assimilates that which is infused. We are not a 
purely Teutonic people, because no people is purely 
anything. But our kernel is purely Teutonic; whatever 
we have received from outside has been assimilated and 
absorbed into a Teutonic body. The Celt of Gaul has 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 95 

never changed his home, but on his own soil he has 
adopted the speech of the Roman and the name of the 
Frank. We have all of us changed our home once; 
some of us have changed it twice. But in none of our 
three homes have we ever cast aside our national lan- 
guage ; in none of them, I hope I may say, have we 
ever cast aside our national name. 

On the early history of our language I mean to speak 
more fully at another stage. At present I will only ask 
you to bear in mind the distinction between change of 
language and change within a language. All languages 
change ; they change in two ways : they change by the 
changes within the language itself, such as the wearing 
out of inflexions, the cutting down of words to a shorter 
form. They change also by taking in words from other 
languages. No language is wholly free from changes of 
both these kinds, though some languages have been much 
more largely affected by them than others. In most 
cases, by dint of the two, languages change so much 
that, after a reasonable time, say a thousand years or so, 
the elder form becomes unintelligible, and has to be 
learned like another language. For practical purposes 
it has become another language ; but in the eyes of the 
philologer and the historian it is still the same. No- 
thing has happened to change what we may call its per- 
sonal identity ; it has changed, but only as a man changes 
in passing from infancy to old age ; it remains the same 
language in the same sense that the new-born babe and 
the hoary grey-beard are the same man. In this sense 
we have never changed our language ; in this sense the 
tongue of Hengest and Cerdic and the tongue of Glad- 



96 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

stone and Garfield is the same tongue. The change has 
been great; but it has been wholly a change within 
the language itself; we have never cast aside one lan- 
guage and taken to another. We have never done as 
the Celts and Iberians of Gaul did when they cast aside 
their native Celtic and Iberian tongues, and took to the 
Latin tongue instead. We have never done, as a large 
part of the inhabitants of the British islands have done, 
when they cast aside their Welsh and Irish speech and 
took to English instead. Bear this in mind : however 
much the English tongue has changed, however great an 
infusion of foreign words it may have received, yet at no 
period of our history did it supplant any other tongue ; 
at no period of our history was it ever supplanted by 
any other tongue. And if you bear this in mind, I think 
you will see that it was something more than a question 
of words when I insisted on the necessity of calling that 
tongue by one and the same name from its earliest stages 
to its latest. If we call it by one name up to a certain 
year, and by some other name after that year, we disguise 
the fact that the historical identity of the language has 
never been broken. And compound languages do not 
exist at all. Even a compound nation like the French 
does not speak a compound language. The Latin speech 
of Gaul took in a large Teutonic infusion ; but it remains 
a Latin speech. The English speech of Britain took in 
a yet larger Romance infusion; but it remains a Teu- 
tonic speech; 

The first migration then of the English people, the 
migration which led us from the continent of Europe to 
the isle of Britain, differed in many of its circumstances 



THE FIRST VOYAGE AND THE SECOND. 97 

from the second migration of the English people, that 
led some of us from the isle of Britain to the continent 
of America. Those differences chiefly arise from the 
fact that the first migration was made in the infancy of 
our nation, or rather that it was the migration itself 
which formed the nation; while the second migration 
was made after the nation had reached the fulness of its 
growth. The English nation put on its distinctive cha- 
racter among nations in the space of time, no short 
space, a thousand years and more, which passed between 
the two migrations. Far more change therefore natu- 
rally followed the first migration than has followed the 
second. But notwithstanding all this, the first and the 
second migration are both alike simply stages in the his- 
tory of the same people. At each stage our forefathers, or 
some of them, sought for themselves new homes beyond 
the sea. And each change of home had its effect on 
those who made the change. But neither the migra- 
tions themselves, nor yet anything that we did or suf- 
fered in the long ages between the migrations, did any- 
thing to break the continuity of our national being, to 
disturb the personal identity of our national tongue. 
Between the first and the second England the severance 
has been greater; the men of the Teutonic mainland 
and the men of the Teutonic island have become in 
many things strangers. And yet they are not wholly 
strangers. Whether in reading the records of past 
times or in personally visiting the lands of our earliest 
dwelling, the memories of ancient brotherhood are 
constantly pressing themselves on the mind. Along 
the whole of that long coast, from the Channel to the 
Baltic, Flemish, Frisian, Saxon, Anglian, we feel, in a 



9§ THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

way that we do not feel in the lands of the Romance, 
or even of the High-German, speech, that we are still 
among brethren. And we may be forgiven if, among 
those memories, we are sometimes tempted to exalt 
ourselves, and to think that the highest mission of the 
oldest England was to act as the starting-point for the 
migration which made the second. Whether the high- 
est mission of the- second England has been to act as 
the starting-point for the migration which made the 
third, I will not seek to inquire ; I trust you will not 
lay it upon me to inquire. I trust that the second and 
the third England may live long enough side by side 
in true brotherhood to make it needless to stir up such 
invidious questions on either side. Let us not commit 
the unwisdom rebuked ages ago by the highest voice, of 
disputing among ourselves which should be the great- 
est. Let us rather hope that both may long remain 
great, and that each may ever rejoice in the greatness 
of the other. Between them at least there need be no 
severance, such as the events of history have wrought 
between both of them and the England of a yet earlier 
day. Though the Ocean rolls between them, as the sea 
rolled between Corinth and Syracuse, between Phokaia 
and Massalia, yet, as Corinth and Syracuse, Phokaia and 
Massalia, were all alike members of the one Hellenic 
body, so the scattered members of the English folk, 
parted in place, parted in polity, but not parted in heart 
or speech, should, in all times and in all places, remem- 
ber that the English folk is one. 



LECTURE IV. 

Sflje ©Itrest ffinglanir antr tfje jSeconir. 

I once heard of an audience who, in listening to a 
speaker, waited for the end of his exordium, but the end 
of his exordium did not come. In other words, he broke 
off in the middle of his speech, and never came to the 
end of it. Perhaps the statement so put merely illus- 
trates the danger of using hard words without fully- 
grasping their meaning. I can fancy that he who 
thus described the disappointed hearers might, if another 
word had come into his head, have thought it sounded 
equally well to say that they waited for the end of his 
peroration. But I am beginning to fear that the de- 
scription may be literally true of the present course of 
lectures. I am beginning to fear that, through three 
evenings' work, you have been waiting for the end of 
my exordium, and I am not myself quite clear that the 
end of my exordium is yet come. So far from having 
come to the beginning of the end, I am not clear that I 
have come to the end of the beginning. I have spent 
half my course on general statements and answers to 
possible objections. And I am not at all clear that I 
have got to the end of the objections even now. I 
will not insult the great continent to which I have lately 
made my way by assuming it as possible that it harbours 
any of the sect of the Anglo-Israelites, the sect which holds 

99 



100 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

that we are all of the stock of the Jews. But I should 
not say Jews either. The full developement of the doc- 
trine traces up the English to the tribe of Ephraim and 
the Irish to the tribe of Dan. Now one of the prophets 
bids us answer a fool according to his folly ; and I have 
always thought that to this argument it was answer 
enough to say that, according to another prophet, 
Ephraim feedeth on wind, and that John Bull has always 
been thought to need somewhat stronger meat. No, I 
will not believe that the Anglo-Israelites are other than 
a purely insular curiosity. If I am shown one on 
American soil, I shall ask to see his brother who believes 
that the earth is flat, and that the sun is only three miles 
from it. But I am followed about by visions of some 
enemy who may arise to say that none of us on 
either side of the Ocean are English after all, but that 
we are all of us Welsh. There is an ingenious gentle- 
man at Liverpool of that way of thinking, and he has 
proved his point by finding very hard Welsh derivations 
for the easiest English words. Those who understand 
the Celtic tongues better than I, perhaps better than the 
Liverpool gentleman, tell me that some of his ancient 
Welsh turns out to be modern Irish ; but I suppose that 
does not greatly matter when a man has got tight hold 
of a theory. Now as this theory is, at all events, one 
degree less absurd than that of the Anglo-Israelites, and 
as the communication between Liverpool and the United 
States is very direct — only just stopping at Queenstown 
to take in an Irish derivation or two — it did strike me 
as possible that this form of error may* have managed 
to straggle across the Ocean, while I cannot bring my- 
self to believe that there is a single Anglo-Israelite in 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. IOI 

the New World. But I will not formally argue against 
the votary of the Briton, any more than against the 
votary of the Hebrew. I will state my own case, and 
the grounds on which it rests, if indeed I shall not show 
some disrespect to my hearers by even stating the 
grounds of a case which is so perfectly plain. 

We have now got halfway through our journey; 
and it is time that we should try and call up some 
more definite notion of the first great journey of 
the English folk across the sea. I lay a special stress 
on this last word. If the second journey was made 
by sea, that was in no sort wonderful. That the colo- 
nies of England from the seventeenth century onwards 
were made by sea is involved in the insular position 
of England. But the special insular position of Eng- 
land is only a stronger case of the general position of the 
colonizing powers of Europe. Portugal, the leader in the 
work, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, have 
all colonized by sea. They could not colonize in any 
other way. There is only one European power which 
can colonize in any other way. The peculiar geograph- 
ical position of Russia has enabled that power, first to 
annex a vast Asiatic dominion marching immediately 
on its European territory, and then to make its way 
into America, not by crossing the Atlantic toward the 
west, but by crossing a strait of the Pacific toward the 
east. That Russian territory in America has now been 
added to the possessions of the English-speaking folk ; 
but the English-speaking folk could never have reached 
it in the first instance in that peculiar way in which it was 
perfectly natural for Russia to reach it. But it would seem 
that the other way of coming has answered better for 



102 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

the planting of new nations of European descent on the 
soil of the New World. No new Russian nation has, so 
to speak, crept into America by the way of Behring's 
Strait. But a new English nation, a new Portuguese 
nation, and more than one new Spanish nation, still 
stand on American ground. A new French nation has 
arisen, to yield its place to the colonists of England, 
dependent and independent. And all these outlying 
European nations have been formed within the two 
great peninsulas of the New World by the process of 
boldly crossing the Atlantic westward. 

Now why do I call your attention to anything so ob- 
vious as this ? I do it for this reason. The migration 
from the first England to the second, and the migration 
from the second England to the third, were alike made 
by sea. But the mode of migration which was natural, 
and even necessary, in the seventeenth century was alto- 
gether exceptional in the fifth. In the whole course of 
the Wandering of the Nations, the only great Teutonic 
settlement made by sea within the Roman Empire, or 
within lands which had lately been part of the Roman 
Empire, was the settlement of the Angles and Saxons in 
Britain. They settled by sea : Goths, Vandals, Franks, 
Burgundians, settled by land. I shall hardly have it 
thrown in my teeth that the Vandals passed into 
Africa by sea; their passage was not a long one, and 
they had already passed into Spain by land. The 
cause of the difference is obvious : Gaul, Spain, Italy, 
could be reached by land ; the isle of Britain could 
not. Bat the results of the difference are great indeed. 
They amount simply to this, that there is to this day 
an English tongue in the world, and an English folk to 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. IO3 

speak it. Where is the Goth in Gaul, in Spain, and Italy ? 
There is not so much as a name on the map to give an 
answer even to our eyes. Where is the Burgundian ? 
Where is the Frank ? The names of both abide ; the 
name of one of them is still the name of a mighty nation. 
But ask them to give an account of themselves in our 
ears, and they can give it only in a tongue which is still 
essentially the tongue of Rome. But, alike in Middle 
England and in New, the English name abides, and the 
English tongue abides with it. The Goth and the Frank, 
the people of Ataulf and the people of Hlodwig, have 
been lost for ages among the greater mass of those whom 
they subdued, but did not drive out. But the Angle and 
the Saxon, merged together under the common English 
name, but never merged in the mass of those whom they 
subdued, still abide within the bounds within which they 
did something more than subdue. Where they settled, 
they drove out ; where they never thoroughly settled, the 
older inhabitants of the land abide beside them. In the 
isle of Britain, if the Englishman is there, the Briton is 
there too, still speaking his ancient tongue within no in- 
considerable part of his ancient land. From Gaul the 
tongue of Vercingetorix and the tongue of Hlodwig 
have both passed away. Or, at the very most, a tongue 
which may have been that of Vercingetorix has been 
kept alive in a corner by settlements from Britain. The 
tongue of Caesar is still the speech of the land. It has 
indeed gone through great changes, but it has never 
been cast aside or exchanged for another tongue. But 
the isle of Britain knows not the tongue of Caesar in 
either its older or its newer shape. The speech of the 
land is the tongue of Hengest and Cerdic. It has indeed 



104 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

gone through great changes, but it has never been cast 
aside or exchanged for another tongue. And by its 
side the tongue of Arthur and Cadwalader abides, the 
speech of no small remnant of that elder folk of the 
land against which Hengest and Cerdic had to wage so 
stern a warfare. 

In these last words lies the root of the matter. The 
Teutonic settlers in Britain had to wage a long and stern 
warfare with the elder folk of the land, because the 
land was an island and because the Teutonic settlers 
therefore came to it by sea. In that age, as in every 
other, the insular position of Britain has determined the 
character and history of the land and its people. Because 
Britain was an island, because the Teutonic invaders 
came by sea, the Teutonic invaders were quite another 
kind of people from the Teutonic invaders of Gaul and 
Spain. For the same cause, the people whom the Angles 
and Saxons found in Britain were quite another kind of 
people from those whom the Goths, Franks, and Bur- 
gundians found in Gaul and Spain. 

Let us stop for a moment to call up such a picture as 
we can of our earliest forefathers when they made their 
first great voyage. It is not a very clear or full picture 
that we can draw ; it will be largely a negative picture ■ 
but that our picture is not clear or full, that it is largely 
negative, is one of the most important features of our 
case. Our very ignorance is part of our knowledge ; 
the very little that we know of our own forefathers, as 
compared with the other Teutonic nations who were 
changing their dwelling-places at the same time, goes far 
to show the wide differences in their several positions. 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. IO5 

So it is with those in whose land they settled themselves. 
Our notices of the state of Britain at the time of the 
English Conquest are of the most meagre kind. We 
have no contemporary record, English or British, of its 
earlier stages. We get one or two dry entries in foreign 
chroniclers, which show that the work was going on, but 
they help us to no detail. We have a British lamentation, 
the famous book of Gildas, belonging to a later stage of 
the Conquest, which gives us a general picture and the 
names of a few persons ; but its author is too busy 
preaching strictly to record very many events. The nar- 
rative in the English Chronicles I believe to preserve a 
thoroughly trustworthy tradition ; the more we test it by 
results, the more we compare the narrative with the 
country in which this and that event is placed, the more 
we contrast its sober statements with the wild tales of 
later writers, the more we are inclined to give it its full 
confidence. I at least, who, in my own West-Saxon 
home, find my own fields and my own parish bounded 
by a boundary drawn in the year 577, am not disposed 
to disbelieve the record of the events which led to the 
fixing of that boundary. Still, we cannot set down the 
English Chronicle in the fifth century as a contempo- 
rary narrative in the same sense in which it has become 
in the eleventh. Our records then are meagre ; the re- 
cords of the Teutonic conquests in other lands are hardly 
so full as we could wish them to be ; but they are wealth 
compared with any materials that we have for the con- 
quest of Britain. We should be happy indeed if we had 
such a portrait of Saxon Ceawlin or Anglian ^Ethelfrith 
as Sidonius Apollinaris gives us of Theodoric the West- 
Goth. 



106 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

But, as we just said, our ignorance is our knowledge. 
If our own settlement had been at all of the same kind 
as the contemporary settlements elsewhere, we may be 
sure that the same kind of record would have been in 
being. It is because the condition of Britain was 
wholly different from the condition of Gaul and Spain, 
because the condition of the invaders of Britain was 
wholly different from the condition of the invaders 
of Gaul and Spain, that our records of the Teutonic 
conquest of Gaul and Spain are comparatively rich, 
while our records of the Teutonic conquest of Brit- 
ain are so utterly meagre. The wide historic gap on 
one side of the Channel, while there is no gap on the 
other side, really teaches us more than any amount of 
detail could have taught us. We see that the isle of 
Britain had quite passed away from that general mass 
of the Roman dominion of which Gaul and Spain still 
formed parts. We see that the invaders of Britain had 
not been brought under the same measure of Roman 
influences as the Teutonic invaders of other lands. In 
other words, once more, Britain was an island, and its 
invaders came by sea. 

The power of Rome, beyond the immediate Mediter- 
ranean lands, was essentially a land power. Caesar was 
emphatically lord of the sea ; we cannot call him lord 
of the Ocean. The Roman shipmen saw enough of the 
outer world of waters to know that Ocean was some- 
thing more than a river running round the world. They 
had learned that men who lived on the western coast of 
Spain had no real chance of daily hearing the sun hiss as 
his fiery ball sank into the waters of the giant stream. 
But their oceanic voyages were of no great account, and 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 107 

were wholly secondary to enterprises by land. Gaul and 
Spain were reached by land or by voyages across the 
inner sea. Britain was the only Roman province which 
needed any dealings with the waters of Ocean, and that 
only with one of his narrowest straits. Agricola is com- 
monly believed" to have sailed round the whole north of 
Britain, but some scholars have called this belief in ques- 
tion ; it is certain that neither Agricola nor any one else 
ever brought the whole of Britain under the power of 
Rome. And the conquest of the other great oceanic 
island, the conquest of Ireland, though sometimes talked 
of, was never even attempted. In Germany, the land with 
which as yet we are more concerned than with Britain, 
the Roman dominion was still more thoroughly that of a 
land power. The lasting dominion of Rome was bounded 
by the Rhine and the Danube. It was bounded by those 
rivers, though it stretched somewhat beyond them. It 
stretched beyond them only so far as to keep possession 
of both banks, and so to make the really Roman side 
secure. To maintain the frontiers of the Rhine and the 
Danube was, from the first century to the fifth, the great 
object of Rome's European policy and warfare ; to cross 
those rivers into the rich provinces of the Empire was the 
great longing of the independent nations of Germany. 
As they grew stronger, as the Empire grew weaker, 
their wish was carried out. Franks, Alemans, Burgun- 
dians, Suevians, a crowd of other Teutonic nations, made 
their way across the rivers in various characters, while 
the greatest name of all, the Goths, Eastern and Western, 
came by more roundabout paths from the eastern lands. 
Some came as captives, to become slaves in Roman 
households or to be butchered to make a Roman holiday. 



108 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Some came as plunderers, to work havoc in Roman 
fields and Roman cities and to carry off the spoil 
to their own homes. Some came as soldiers in the 
Roman armies, waging the wars of Rome, perhaps 
against their own fellows, taking Roman pay, learning 
Roman discipline, receiving the reward of their services 
in the shape of lands within the Empire of Caesar to be 
held as Caesar's liegemen. Their kings deemed them- 
selves honoured when they bore the titles of Roman civil 
and military officers. They went on Caesar's errand to 
win back Caesar's lost provinces, and it was only step by 
step that they found out that they had become indepen- 
dent princes, that their followers had become independent 
nations, that they had in truth torn away Caesar's cities 
and provinces from his rule. In all these ways, the Teu- 
tonic settlers in the Roman provinces on the mainland, 
if they were conquerors, were also disciples. They did 
not come on an errand of mere destruction. Havoc 
indeed often marked their course, but only such havoc 
as must follow the necessities or the caprices of warfare, 
above all of warfare where men are seeking new lands 
to dwell in. The Teutonic king, in occupying a Roman 
land, did without scruple whatever was needful to estab- 
lish his own power and to reward the services of his fol- 
lowers. And a large amount of destruction, of confisca- 
tion, of human suffering generally, is involved in this. 
But there was no systematic destruction ; there was no 
abiding warfare waged against the lives, the proper- 
ties, the monuments, the laws, or the language, of the 
Roman inhabitants. The Teutonic conquerors, while 
they only half understood, still respected and admired, a 
civilization more advanced than their own. Rome her 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. IO9 

arts and her arms, her laws and her titles, had impressed 
their minds before they crossed her frontier ; they im- 
pressed them still when they were firmly settled on 
Roman soil. The Roman cities lived through the storm, 
losing much doubtless of their ancient wealth and gran- 
deur, but keeping on an unbroken life as Roman cities. 
Their inhabitants, the Roman inhabitants generally, kept 
their own language, laws, and customs, till, by their imi- 
tation of their Teutonic masters, by their Teutonic mas- 
ters' imitation of them, the language, laws, and customs 
of the two were mingled together into a third state of 
things unlike either the purely Teutonic or the purely 
Roman. Step by step, more quickly in some lands, 
more slowly in others, conquerors and conquered were 
fused into a third people different from either. Instead of 
two nations side by side, the Teutonic Frank speak- 
ing his Teutonic tongue, the Romanized Gaul speaking 
his Latin tongue, there gradually grew up the one 
French nation, bearing a modified form of the Teu- 
tonic name, speaking a modified form of the Roman 
tongue. But before this a change had taken place, while 
the Frank was still a German, while he still spoke his 
unmixed Teutonic tongue as his native speech, but 
spoke Latin alongside of it as the tongue of govern- 
ment and literature, the great event took place which 
marked how truly the Teuton had in one sense con- 
quered the Roman, how truly, in another sense, the 
Roman had conquered the Teuton. The solemn inaug- 
uration of the new state of things, the state of things in 
which Roman and Teuton were to have an equal share, 
came on that great day when the Frank Pippin received 
the title and power of Patrician of the Romans — on that 



110 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

greater day when the Frank Charles received the crown 
of the Roman Empire at the hands of the Roman 
Bishop, amidst the rejoicing shouts of the Roman 
people. 

Now not the least sign of the full greatness of the 
change is implied in the fact that the Frank king re- 
ceived his Roman crown at the hands of the Roman 
bishop. The Holy Roman Empire had begun; the 
Galilaean had conquered ; the kingdoms of the world 
had become the kingdoms of the Lord; the rule of 
Christ and the rule of Csesar now stretched over well nigh 
the same portions of the earth's surface, and Csesar was 
now admitted to his office, not by the auguries which de- 
clared the will of Jove, but by the holy unction which 
the Church had borrowed from the practice of the elder 
Law. By the time that the Teutonic invasions began 
to grow into Teutonic settlements, Christianity had 
become the dominant religion in the continental pro- 
vinces of the West. We must remember that the Old 
Rome remained pre-eminently a pagan city long after 
the greater part of the Empire had received the faith. 
The Teutonic settlers found paganism a creed all but 
dead, and their coming no doubt helped to stamp 
out what little life was left in it. For the invaders 
of the continental lands of the Empire were Christian 
invaders. Some had become proselytes before their 
coming; others became proselytes in the course of 
their coming. True, with the single exception of the 
Franks, all embraced Christianity in its Arian form ; 
but, save only among the Vandals of Africa, the Catholic 
believers nowhere suffered any general persecution at the 
hands of the heretics. And gradually all, save those who 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. Ill 

were rooted out before the work could be done, embraced 
the faith of their Roman subjects. All, sooner or later, 
accepted the religion of Rome along with her laws and 
her general civilization. They accepted it, not by virtue 
of any conversion from without, but as part of their gene- 
ral position as settlers in a Roman land. And in northern 
Gaul, above all, where the Franks accepted, not only Chris- 
tianity but Catholic Christianity, in the very act of their 
coming, the Teutonic conquest can hardly be said to have 
made any change at all in the formal position of the Chris- 
tian Church. The gradual effects of the change were of 
the highest moment, and they were by no means always 
to the advantage of religion. But formal change there 
was none ; there was no gap in the records of the local 
churches, no break in the succession of bishops ; the 
Roman clergy indeed gained an influence over their 
Teutonic converts greater than they were likely to gain 
over their Roman brethren. Now and then a righteous 
bishop might personally suffer for rebuking a wicked 
king; but the clerical order, as an order, undoubtedly 
gained in power, wealth, and influence, through the set- 
tlement of the so-called barbarians. Bishops and abbots 
held a far more lordly position under the Frankish king 
than they had ever held under the Roman Augustus. 

The characteristic feature then of the Teutonic set- 
tlement in the Roman provinces of the mainland- is that 
the amount of change that was made was far less than 
might have been looked for from the words " barbarian 
conquest." There is no blank in the record, no break 
in the course of things, no general beginning afresh of 
everything. The Roman language, the Roman law, the 
Roman religion, all lived on, and there can be no doubt 



112 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

that the bulk of the modern population is still Roman 
in the sense which the Roman name bore at the time 
of the Frankish invasion. The Roman cities lived on 
with their old names, or with the names of the tribes 
of which they were the heads ; the Roman divisions of 
the country lived on in the dioceses of the bishops ; no 
general change of nomenclature spread over the smaller 
places ; the Teutonic names, where there are any, belong 
mainly to a later time, and may be accounted for by spe- 
cial causes. In particular districts, chiefly those near the 
old frontier, the amount of change was certainly greater 
than elsewhere. The cause is obvious. The nearer the 
invader came to the centre of the land, the more fully 
could he be brought under Roman influences, the less 
would he be inclined to play the part of a mere de- 
stroyer. But the general picture is as I have drawn it, 
and it is not a picture of universal havoc and rooting up. 
The Teutonic settlement in Gaul and Spain wrought far 
more change through the gradual working of the new 
causes which it set at work than it wrought by the 
immediate results of the actual work of conquest. To 
sum all up in a word, the land kept its Christian faith 
and its Roman speech, and its conquerors embraced 
both. 

Now all this could be, because the conquerors were 
conquerors who pressed in step by step by land, who, 
before they settled on Roman ground, were familiar with 
all that was Roman both in war and peace, who admired 
and respected what they were familiar with, who at each 
step as they advanced learned more what Rome and her 
work was, and admired and respected more as they 
learned more. It was conquest, barbarian conquest if 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. I 1 3 

you will, but it was something very different from the 
sudden sweeping down on a civilized land of conquerors 
by whom civilization was utterly unknown and despised. 
To be conquered by Goths and Franks was another 
thing from being conquered by Huns or Avars. It 
was also, as we may now go to see, another thing from 
being conquered by Angles and Saxons. 

To judge of the difference, look first for one moment 
at the modern map of England and the modern map 
of France. In one sense the French map is the most 
modern-looking of the two. For it will show you a 
land divided into very modern departments, while the 
English map will show you a land divided into very 
ancient shires or counties. The one shows you the 
divisions of the eighteenth century, younger by far than 
the older States of your own land ; the other shows you 
divisions of which, in England proper, two or three only 
are later than the tenth century. But go one step below 
the surface, and you will see how ancient is the real 
local nomenclature of France, how comparatively re- 
cent is that of England. Of the English shires, very 
few keep names older than the English conquest ; Kent 
indeed keeps its British name, as Massachusetts keeps 
its Indian name ; but, as a rule, the older English shires 
bear names taken from the circumstances of the con- 
quest, and the later ones are called after towns, many 
of them of later foundation than the conquest. The 
nomenclature of the French cities, towns, villages, is 
mainly handed on from days before the Teutonic con- 
quest, while in England nearly every name, save those 
of the rivers and of a few great cities, is purely Teutonic. 



114 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

In most parts the names are strictly English ; in some 
parts they were given at the later coming of the Danes ; 
nowhere are they British or Roman, save in certain dis- 
tricts owing to certain special causes. Crowds of places 
bear descriptive Teutonic names ; crowds of places bear 
the names of Teutonic tribes ; crowds of places bear the 
names of personal Teutonic settlers. Except in certain 
lands affected by special causes, France has nothing 
like this to show. A glance at the map shows that the 
mass of the local nomenclature of England begins with 
the Teutonic conquest, while the mass of the local no- 
menclature of France is older than the Teutonic con- 
quest. And, if we turn from the names on the map to 
the living speech of men, there is the most obvious, but 
the most important, of all facts, the fact that English- 
men speak English and that Frenchmen speak French. 
That is to say, in Gaul the speech of Rome lived through 
the Teutonic conquest, while in Britain it perished in 
the Teutonic conquest, if it had not passed away before. 
And behind this is the fact, very much less obvious, a 
good deal less important, but still very important, that in 
Gaul tongues older than Latin live on only in corners as 
mere survivals, while in Britain, w T hile Latin has utterly 
vanished, a tongue older than Latin still lives on as the 
common speech of an appreciable part of the land. 

Here then is the final result open to our own eyes. 
And it is a final result which could not have come to 
pass unless the Teutonic conquest of Britain had been 
something of an utterly different character from the 
Teutonic conquest of Gaul — unless the amount of 
change, of destruction, of havoc of every kind, above 
all, of slaughter and driving out of the existing inhab- 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 115 

itants, had been far greater in Britain than it was in 
Gaul. If the Angles and Saxons in Britain had been 
only as the Goths in Spain, or even as the Franks in 
Gaul, it is inconceivable that the final results should 
have been so utterly different in the two cases. There is 
the plain fact : Gaul remained a Latin-speaking land ; 
England became a Teutonic-speaking land. The obvious 
inference is that, while in Gaul the Teutonic conquest 
led to no general displacement of the inhabitants, in 
England it did lead to such a general displacement. In 
Gaul the Franks simply settled among a subject people, 
among whom they themselves were gradually merged ; 
in Britain the Angles and Saxons slew or drove out 
the people whom they found in the land, and settled it 
again as a new people. 

This is the plain doctrine, which to many seems 
so hard a saying, but which the existing facts so clear- 
ly teach us. And when we come to see who the 
invaders were, and what was the state of the land 
which they invaded, it will no longer seem a thing of 
wonder, but a thing that could hardly fail to be. Let 
us look, first at those who were to do the work, and 
then at those upon whom they were to do it. In 
other words, let us look at the men who made the 
voyage, and at the island to which they made it. 
Hitherto, as I have so often impressed on you, we 
have been speaking of Teutonic conquerors who knew 
something of Roman arts and manners, and who respect- 
ed what they knew. Pressing in step by step along the 
Rhenish and Danubian frontiers, they were able to 
become disciples in the very act of becoming con- 



Il6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

querors. Not so with the men who lay beyond them, 
the tribes of the Oceanic coast of Germany and of the 
marchland of Denmark, the tribes of the long Frisian 
shore and the Frisian islands, the tribes of the elder 
Saxony on either side of Elbe, the men of our own 
special metropolis, the men of the oldest England, the 
men of the special Angeln, the outlying corner of our 
race, looking out toward the lands of the Scandinavian 
and the Slave. It must have been a dim glimmering 
indeed of the fame of Rome which could have reached 
them. The memories of the distant time when Rome 
had for a moment threatened them must have well nigh 
died out before a single keel set forth to seek a new 
home in the isle of Britain. In the days of Drusus 
indeed it had seemed as if even those lands were to be 
added to the vast domains of the city by the Tiber, as 
if the Elbe, or some stream beyond the Elbe, was to be 
what the Rhine came to be. Had it been so, I repeat, 
we could never have been ; our ancient land would have 
become a Roman province, the ancient tongue of Ger- 
many would have given way to the Imperial speech no 
less than the ancient tongues of Gaul. Had the first 
home of the English people thus gone to swell the mass 
of artificial Romans, I could never have had a word to 
say about their second or their third home. From that 
doom Arminius saved us ; for that boon I again call on 
you to honor him. Some years back you were keeping 
the hundredth year of the first birth of your Federal 
commonwealth ; this year you are keeping the hun- 
dredth year of the event which made its new-born being 
sure. In the blow by the Teutoburg Wood was the 
germ of the Declaration of Independence, the germ of 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. \\J 

the surrender of Yorktown. But for that blow, we 
should have been civilized before our time, we should 
have had our national being civilized out of us; or 
rather we should have been civilized to death before we 
had reached the stage of having a national being at all. 
Arminius saved us from this early promotion to a Buddh- 
ist paradise ; through his act we were left to grow up 
for some ages in a youthful and healthy barbarism in 
our oldest home, till the time came when we were to 
make our voyage to our second home, there to work 
out for ourselves a civilization of our own, the common 
possession of our second home and our third. There 
we grew up, apart, so to speak, from the history of the 
world, during all the earlier stages of the Wandering 
of the Nations. We may have heard the echoes of the 
names of the great city and its all-powerful princes, but 
they touched not us. Our forefathers of those days may 
have heard of them as something vast and distant and 
wonderful, as our later forefathers heard of the Grand 
Khan and the Great Mogul. We knew them not either 
as friends or as enemies. The chained Briton might be 
led along the Sacred Way, but never the chained Saxon. 
Constantine might throw his Frankish captives to the 
wild beasts at Trier; Anglian captives he never had 
to throw. We served not in Caesar's armies ; we took 
not Caesar's pay ; we held no lands by the tenure of 
guarding Caesar's frontiers. Our ealdormen, our herc- 
togan, the elders of our folk, the leaders of our hosts — 
kings we had none in our first home — never sought to 
be called Patricians of the Roman commonwealth or 
Masters-general of the Roman army. We knew naught 
of Caesar's tongue or of Caesar's law ; we never in our 



Il8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

old homes bowed to the gods of Rome; we knew 
naught of the older faith of Jupiter of the Capitol nor 
yet of the newer faith whose temples presently arose in 
the Lateran palace and on the Vatican hill. We knew 
no gods but Woden and Thunder and the rest of the 
old Teutonic company. We knew no law but the old 
Teutonic customs ; we knew no speech but the old Teu- 
tonic tongue, and that in a more ancient shape than it 
bore on the lips of the Frank and the Aleman. True, 
our faith, our customs, our language, were all but frag- 
ments of the primitive Aryan stock common to Rome 
and Germany ; but the shape which we had given them 
was our own ; we had no more borrowed one jot or one 
tittle from any Roman source than Rome had borrowed 
from our despised barbarian store. So we lived on un- 
recorded ; that we lived on unrecorded is the most in- 
structive part of our history, as best showing what man- 
ner of life ours was. At last the day came, a day mem- 
orable in the annals of the world, when we were to begin 
to lead another life. 

In the latter half of the fifth century came the turn of 
our forefathers by Weser and Elbe and Slie — perhaps 
from lands both further westward and further eastward 
— to share, like their brethren, in the Wandering of the 
Nations. It is well worth notice that some of our kins- 
folk seem to have wandered by land, and with nearly the 
same results as those of their greater wanderings by sea. 
I know not any other way of explaining the remarkable 
nomenclature of some parts of Picardy, as very clearly 
brought out by Mr. Isaac Taylor. There, some way within 
the bounds of ancient Gaul and even of modern France, 
we find a local nomenclature, not merely Teutonic, not 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. II9 

merely Nether-Dutch, but distinctively English, dealing 
not only in hams but in tons, the only part, as far as I 
know, of the European mainland where that purely Eng- 
lish ending is to be found. When Edward the Third 
won Calais and Guines, when Henry the Eighth won 
Boulogne, they might have argued that they were win- 
ning back a lost possession, not indeed of the English 
crown, but of the English folk. So again at a later 
time, it would seem that Saxon warriors had a share in 
that great Lombard wandering which gave a new name 
to the most northern and the most southern Italy. But 
these movements by land were exceptional ; they answer 
to the exceptional voyages here and there recorded of 
Goths and Franks. Our real and lasting share in the 
great stirring of the nations was as essentially done by 
sea as the real and lasting share of the Goths and the 
Franks was done by land. 

But it was not enough that the course of our wander- 
ings should be by sea ; it was needful that the object of 
them should be an island. A great and successful 
movement often sends before it, as it were, a forerunner 
of what is coming. Its coming is heralded by move- 
ments which are great but not successful, by movements 
which are successful but not great. So it was with the 
settlement of the Angles and Saxons in the isle of 
Britain. It was through movements that were success- 
ful but not great that Saxon settlements were made 
on the northern coast of Gaul by Bayeux, on the banks 
of the Loire in Anjou, and even, it is said, at the inland 
city of Seez. Such settlements as these are matters of 
mere curiosity ; their utmost importance is as showing 
the wide range of Saxon enterprise ; they had no effect on 



120 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

the general history of the world. Colonies of this kind, 
occupying small and isolated positions on a mainland 
inhabited by men of other nations, cannot permanently 
keep their distinctive character : they are either driven 
out by the earlier inhabitants or they are lost in the 
greater mass of the earlier inhabitants. The field on 
which we were to do deeds which should affect the gen- 
eral history of the world was not to be found on this or 
that point of the oceanic shore of Gaul, still less on this 
or that point of any Gaulish riverside. It was another 
thing when an invading Saxon fleet was beaten back 
from the shores of Britain. That a Saxon fleet should 
come and should be beaten back was perhaps a needful 
stage in the drama ; it was an earnest that days were in 
store when Saxon fleets should come and should not be 
beaten back. That was in the last days of the Roman 
power in Britain, when, for a moment, before its last end, 
the old fire flashed up with a long unwonted blaze, when 
the elder Theodosius beat back the Saxon, beat back the 
Scot, and enlarged the Roman dominion in the island by 
the new province of Valentia. The check was no slight 
one ; sixty or seventy years seem to have passed before 
another expedition to the doomed island set forth from 
the Ocean-coast of Germany. 

The hour at last had come. From the middle of the 
fifth century the Teutonic invasions of Britain again 
begin, and this time invasion grows into conquest, into 
settlement, into full occupation of the greater part of the 
invaded island. On our forefathers themselves their first 
unsuccessful encounter with the power of Rome seems to 
have wrought no change. They may have better learned 
what the power of Rome was, but assuredly that was all 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 121 

that they learned. No Roman fleet came to wreak the 
Imperial revenge on the German shore ; no Roman 
influence was brought in any way to bear on those who 
had risked their fortunes against the fortunes of Rome 
two generations too soon. When the time came, the 
Jute, the Angle, the Saxon, any other kindred tribes 
that shared in the work, were still untouched by any of 
those softening powers which had made the coming of 
the Teutonic conquerors of the mainland less frightful. 
They were still untouched by the magic of the Roman 
name ; they kept still in its fulness all that distinguished 
the untamed Teutonic heathen. They came, cleaving to 
their old tongue, their old customs, their old gods, or 
rather not so much consciously cleaving to them as 
neither knowing nor caring whether there were tongues 
and customs and gods other than their own. When 
such men went forth, not advancing step by step, with 
a chance of falling back if a false step was taken, but 
trusting themselves to one great effort on the waves, 
when they set forth for a new land and left the old land 
for ever behind them, their errand could not fail to 
be an errand of havoc and destruction to which the 
movements on the mainland supply no parallel. They 
could not but find that the choice before them was 
either to sweep away the men whom they found already 
in the land or to be themselves swept away from the 
land which they were _ striving to make their own 
possession. 

But who were the men whom they found there, and 
in what case were they ? In the other provinces of the 
Empire the Teutonic invaders had found the Roman 



122 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

power still abiding. Weak it might be, decaying it might 
be, ready to break in pieces at the first touch of- a vig- 
orous assailant; but it was still there, still unchanged 
in its outward form. Weak as it might be, there was 
nothing else in the land which had taken its place, there 
was nothing in the land which was ready to take its 
place. There was no gap, no breach, no unrecorded 
intermediate state of things, between the end of the 
Roman power and the beginning of the Teutonic 
power. But in Britain the very darkness in which the 
story is plunged, the very gap in every record, makes us 
at least see thus much, that in that island there was a 
time when the Roman power had come to an end, and 
when the Teutonic power had not yet made a beginning. 
Franks, Goths, Burgundians, invaded a Roman land ; the 
Angles and Saxons invaded a land which had ceased 
to be Roman. We know this at least, that, before the 
English conquest began, the Roman legions had been 
withdrawn from Britain. It was not from Romans, but 
from Britons, that the land had to be won. The darkness 
which hangs over Britain at this moment is, if possible, 
still thicker than that which hangs over the invaders of 
Britain. What was the state of the island at that 
moment? That is one of the hardest to answer of all 
our questions, and it can hardly be answered without 
grappling with an earlier question equally hard. The 
little then we can see leads us to think that some Ro- 
man names, titles, and traditions lingered on— how could 
they fail to linger on ? — but that the people which our 
forefathers found in Britain, fifty years and less after the 
departure of the Roman legions, was essentially a British 
and not a Roman people. In short, what is now Eng- 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 23 

land was then what Wales is still. Or rather, as our 
forefathers would have put it, what is now England was 
then Wales, the land of the Welsh or strangers. Now 
how could this be ? In Gaul and Spain several districts, 
forsaken by the Roman government, held out for a longer 
or shorter time against the Teutonic invaders ; but they 
held out, not as lands of native Gauls or Spaniards, but 
as detached Roman communities, fragments split off 
from the great Roman body. The small fragment of the 
Basques is a real exception ; but they have held out 
against all comers, Roman, Goth, Saracen, Frank, and 
Castilian. Britanny is not a real exception ; there the 
Celtic tongue was kept up by settlements from the 
greater Britain. The name of the land, unheard of in 
earlier times, proves the truth of the tradition. Gaul, 
as a whole, whether forsaken or subdued, remained 
Roman ; Britain, it is perfectly plain, had practically 
ceased to be Roman in the short time which passed 
between the departure of the legions and the coming 
of the English. 

Now this question at once suggests another: Did 
Britain ever become Roman in the same sense in which 
Gaul and Spain became Roman ? When I say Britain, 
of course I except that northern part of the island 
which never became part of the Roman province. But, 
south of the fluctuating boundary of the great walls 
drawn from sea to sea, it is perfectly plain that, as far 
as political conquest went, as far as occupation went, 
Britain became as thoroughly Roman as any other part 
of the Empire. Latin was the stone-cutter's only tongue. 
Welsh inscriptions are not common at any time, and the 
few that there are belong, every one of them, I believe, 



124 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

to times after the withdrawal of the legions. Still the 
mass of the people could never have adopted the use 
of Latin to the extent that they did in Gaul and Spain. 
The continued life of the Welsh tongue proves the fact. 
The Welsh tongue is no survival in a corner. It is the 
t(5ngue of a considerable part of the land, of so much 
of the land as the English did not occupy. If the Eng- 
lish had occupied less, the area of the Welsh tongue 
would have been greater ; if the English had never 
come at all, if no later set of conquerors had come, the 
land which is now England would, as far as we can see, 
have remained a British land, speaking the British 
tongue, keeping on a British nationality and forming a 
British literature. The Latin tongue lived on in Britain 
after the withdrawal of the legions, but it lived on, as 
it lives on in modern countries, as a book-language 
specially learned. It did not live on, as it did in Gaul, 
as the tongue of the people, changing from generation 
to generation, till, some ages later, men of the pen 
found out that the tongue which they wrote and the 
tongue which they spoke had practically become two 
different tongues. It was only step by step that men 
awoke to the fact that French and Latin were no longer 
the same tongue. No man at any moment could have 
fancied that Welsh and Latin were the same. The most 
obvious facts of all are the most important and the most 
instructive of all. The main essence of our whole story 
turns on such every-day truths as that, while the French- 
man speaks French and the Englishman speaks Eng- 
lish, so the Welshman still speaks Welsh. 

Now the main reason why Britain was thus less 
thoroughly Romanized than the provinces of the main- 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 12$ 

land, why, as soon as the actual Roman dominion 
was removed, the land could thus fall back on its 
older life, was undoubtedly because Britain was an 
island. An island of the size of Britain, an island 
forming a world of its own, could not be fused into 
the mass of the Empire in the same way as the lands 
which are geographically continuous. I believe that, 
if you had, twenty miles from the port of Boston or of 
New York, a great island like Britain or Sicily, you 
would find it far harder to fuse that island into your 
Federal system than you find it to fuse lands thousands 
of miles off on the other side of the continent. Your 
nearest neighbours have actually found it so. The part 
of British North America which declines to join the Cana- 
dian confederation is the great island of Newfoundland. 
Thus the provinces of the mainland became and remain- 
ed Roman ; the island province never thoroughly became 
Roman, and at the first chance it ceased to become 
Roman at all. Of this came the all-important fact 
that, when we came to make our entry into Britain, 
we had to strive, not against Roman provincials, but 
against a British people. We met with what we may 
fairly call a national resistance, such as our kinsfolk 
nowhere met with on the mainland. I qualify the 
words " national resistance," simply because they might 
be taken as meaning a combined resistance on the part 
of the whole British people. That there certainly never 
was, any more than there ever was any combined attack 
on the part of the whole English people. The whole 
thing was local : a body of English invaders landed in 
one district and made their way against the Britons of 
that district. So did other bands of settlers in other 
9 



126 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

districts, with little or no cooperation on the part either of 
invaders or of defenders. The invaders had never known 
a common head ; the defenders had lost theirs when Caesar 
left them to themselves. Still the resistance was national, 
in so far as it was the resistance of men fighting for their 
own land, and not for the dominion of a distant ruler. 
Patriotism, as we understand the word, loyalty, as we com- 
monly understand the word, were feelings almost impos- 
sible under the Roman dominion. Under that dominion, 
wherever it was established in its fulness — and nowhere 
was it more fully established than in the western pro- 
vinces of the European mainland — national feelings had 
nearly died out. Men had become Romans ; they were 
proud of the Roman name ; they had no wish to throw 
off the Roman dominion ; whatever were the bad points 
of its rule — and, specially as regarded men's purses, 
those bad points were neither few nor small — they felt 
that they were better off as members of a civilized com- 
munity ordered by law than they could be under the 
dominion of any barbarian. But they had neither the 
local patriotism of the mediaeval Italian, nor yet the 
wider patriotism of the great nations of the modern 
world. Nor yet had they that personal attachment to 
the reigning sovereign or his house which in some minds 
is a substitute for patriotism, and which has led some 
even to sin against patriotism. They had no wish to fall 
away from Caesar and his Empire ; but they felt no great 
call to fight for them. They looked to Caesar and his 
legions to protect the Empire, and themselves as part 
of it. If Caesar and his legions could not protect them, 
there was nothing for them to do but to submit. Hence 
the Teutonic invaders won the Roman provinces of the 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. \2J 

mainland with wonderfully little fighting. There was a 
good deal of besieging of cities, but battles in the open 
field were much oftener fought between Teuton and 
Teuton than between Teuton and Roman. The invaders 
had not to win the land by hard fighting, bit by bit. To 
destroy, to slaughter, to drive out of the land, were forms 
of conquest to which they had very little temptation. 
The Roman provincial would gladly have remained a 
Roman provincial, if Caesar had only been able to keep 
his provinces. But when Caesar was no longer able to 
keep his provinces, he changed into a subject of the 
Gothic, Burgundian, or Frankish king with very little 
effort. 

Far different was it in the island world where the 
Briton fought, not for an idea, not for a name, not for 
a conviction that the rule of Caesar, with all its faults, 
was practically the best thing that was to be had, but 
for his own soil, for his own altars, for all that man 
loves and cherishes and worships. It is hard to find an 
exact parallel in other times for the kind of warfare that 
follows. It is not exactly like the entry of civilized men 
into a country of savages. For the Britons, still keep- 
ing much that Rome had taught them, must in all out- 
ward civilization have been far in advance of the English. 
Above all, they were Christians, and the English were 
heathens. Nor was it altogether like an inroad of sav- 
ages into a land of civilized men. The English were 
far from being mere savages ; and, though in outward 
civilization they must have been the inferiors of the 
Britons, yet they had the capacity, to be shown before 
long, for a higher civilization than the Briton ever 
reached. The nearest parallels that I can find are the 



128 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Hebrew conquest of Canaan and the Saracen conquest 
of Africa. I have sometimes read long passages of the 
book of Joshua, and I have felt that, by simply changing 
the local nomenclature of Palestine into the local nomen- 
clature of Britain, we have a narrative of many a page 
of the English conquest of Britain written ages before. 
West-Saxon Ceawlin, like Hebrew Joshua, went on from 
kingdom to kingdom, from city to city. As he did unto 
Cirencester and her king, so did he unto Gloucester and 
her king. But every step was well contested. Hlodwig 
and his sons win all Gaul, and their main fighting is done 
against Alemans, Goths, and Burgundians. It takes Hen- 
gest a life-time, a life-time of battles, to establish the 
English power in the one little kingdom of Kent. Nor 
is the warfare always a warfare of success on the part of 
the invaders. Arthur meets Cerdic face to face, and the 
West-Saxon advance is checked for a generation. Every 
English tribe that landed had to win its own fields for 
itself. But every British tribe that was driven from its 
fields could find shelter in the land that was still uncon- 
quered. Then too we came as heathens. The Catholic 
Frank was ready to worship at once alongside of his 
Roman subject. The Arian Goth allowed at least full tol- 
eration to worshippers of the God whom he himself wor- 
shipped after another form. But the heathen Angle and 
Saxon, still unweaned from his fierce Teutonic creed, 
pressed on in the name of Woden and Thunder to over- 
throw the altars, to uproot the temples, to slay the min- 
isters, of the despised faith of the stranger. Meagre 
as is our picture of the conquest, this feature of it is set 
forth with all clearness by the British Jeremiah. We 
came as barbarians ; we knew nothing of walled cities 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 29 

and their life ; we looked on their defences as prisons. 
It was a day to be marked in our annals when by sheer 
force we stormed the strong walls of some Roman town, 
and set down in boasting that we left not a Bret alive 
within them. And then we turned away from the walls 
which to us were useless ; we left them to stand empty, 
signs that man had once dwelled where he dwelled no 
longer. And on the lands which we made our own we 
sat down by houses, by hundreds, by tribes. The sons 
of some real or mythical patriarch, Wellings, Basings, 
Readings, crowds of others, sat down on the conquered 
land ; they traced about them their mark, their boundary, 
to part off their portion from the portion of their neigh- 
bours ; in the open land, often outside the forsaken 
walls, they placed their liam, their home — a Teutonic name 
that needs no comment — or it might be their tun, their 
town, their place fenced about and hedged for shelter ; 
it might even be their burh, their bury, their borough, their 
rude fortress, the mound with its sheltering palisade. 
Thus came into being an English community, a future 
township, parish, manor — names all of them marking 
stages in our history — perhaps a future market-town, 
a future municipal and parliamentary borough, fated 
perhaps first to stamp its name on the history of Eng- 
land, and then to have its name repeated — as the record 
of nearly the same process — on the shores of America. 
The name might be the name of the house itself and its 
mythical forefather ; it might be the name of the actual 
leader of the settlement ; it might be a descriptive name 
marking some natural or geographical feature of the spot. 
In later times, when men again occupied the sites of Roman 
cities, it might be the British or Roman name turned into 



130 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

an English shape ; in later times again, it might, like the 
Botulfston of which your Boston is a mere shortening, be 
the name no longer of a patron hero, but of a patron saint. 
Not a few of the sites of the Roman cities were in after 
times occupied afresh as English towns ; some doubtless 
held out so long that no time of desolation fell upon 
them at all : they remained strongholds of the Briton 
till the Englishman had learned somewhat of city life, 
and had enriched his tongue by the Roman loan-words 
of port, chester, and street. But others have stood empty 
to this day ; the vast bulwarks fence in no dwelling-place 
of man, but dwelling-places of man have arisen under 
their shadow. Look at the spot on the South-Saxon 
shore which once was Anderida, the spot where one Nor- 
man invasion of England began, and where another was 
beaten back before it began. There stand the Roman walls 
which the South-Saxon ealdormen ^Elle and Cissa storm- 
ed, and slew every living soul within them. The walls 
stand empty; the Norman castle within them stands 
no less empty. But at each end an English settlement 
arose, bearing an English name, each in course of time 
to have its church, one in later times again to grow to 
the rank of a borough. West Ham, the home by the 
west gate of the Roman town, needs no explanation. 
Pevensey, the ea y the shore, of Peofen, must preserve the 
name of the leader of the settlement by the eastern gate. 
Thus, beneath the forsaken works alike of those whom 
he conquered and of those who conquered him, the Eng- 
lishman lives on, the true holder of the land, who has 
made the land his own by giving to it and every spot 
of it such names as he has thought good. And I shall 
be both surprised and disappointed if from so memorable 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 131 

a spot in our second home no settlers have made their 
way to our third home, to plant again the names, not 
of fallen Anderida, but of living West Ham and Pe- 
vensey, on some spot or other of England beyond the 
Ocean. 

In such lectures as these I cannot enter into minute 
detail ; I cannot enlarge on every point which brings 
conviction to my own mind, nor answer at length every 
cavil or even eveiy serious argument. But I put it to 
the common sense of all of you, not merely of the spe- 
cially learned, but of all who choose to use their wits, 
whether any great body of the conquered people 
could have lived on in their former dwelling-places 
through such a conquest as this. If the English people, 
like the French people, are mainly or largely Celtic, 
that is, if the Teutonic conquest of Britain was no more 
than the Teutonic conquest of Gaul, why are the obvi- 
ous results so unlike in the two cases ? If the English 
settlers formed merely a ruling class, like the Franks 
in Gaul, and not, as I hold, a new nation, why did they, 
how did they, wipe out the language and nomenclature 
of the country, both of which went on in Gaul ? How 
again did the religions of the heathen English and the 
Christian Britons fare in such a conquest as this ? The 
English certainly were not converted to Christianity : did 
the Britons apostatize to heathendom ? When we first 
get any detailed narrative, Christianity appears, within 
the Teutonic part of Britain, as a thing of the past. The 
sites and ruins of Christian churches are remembered, 
just as in many lands the sites and ruins of pagan 
temples are remembered now. But there is no sign 



132 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

that Christianity itself, as a faith believed and practised, 
existed within the dominions of any Teutonic prince 
in the island. Nor is there at that stage any sign 
within the dominions of any such prince of the use of 
any tongue but the English, or of any class of peo- 
ple marked out as not being of English blood. The 
tongue, the laws, the creed, of our English forefathers, 
when we first begin to see them more clearly in the last 
years of the sixth century, are as purely Teutonic as 
they could have been at any time of their dwelling in 
their first home. It is for those who argue that a people 
who were thus to all appearances strictly Teutonic were 
really something else — Britons perhaps who had cast 
away their language and had exchanged the faith of 
Christ for the faith of Woden — to prove their own par- 
adox. It is certainly not proved by telling us that Welsh 
is still spoken in Britain, as that fact is one main point 
of our own case. It is not proved by telling us that in 
some special parts of England there are many assimi- 
lated Britons ; we shall see as we go on that that fact 
also is a main point of our own case. It is not proved 
by bringing lists of Latin words which passed into the 
earliest English. When we come to examine those words 
some prove to be cases of primitive Aryan kindred mis- 
taken for derivation; some are cases of the process 
which happens in all conquests, in all cases of inter- 
course between one nation and another, when men keep 
the native name of some object which is strange to them. 
English does not cease to be English in our own day 
because we very often speak of tea and coffee, and now 
and then of pahs and wigwams ; nor did it cease to be 
English then because we took in a few Latin and Welsh 



THE OLDEST ENGLAND AND THE SECOND. 1 33 

names of fruits and other small objects under circum- 
stances which were essentially the same. 

The plain fact is that, in utter contrast to the phenom- 
ena of Teutonic conquest on the mainland, the Britons 
were, as a race, exterminated within those parts of Bri- 
tain which the English occupied while they were still 
heathens. I call your attention to this last qualification; 
we shall have to come to it again. I call your attention 
also to the word exterminate. That is one of a class of 
words which I never use when I can help it ; but I use 
it in this case, because it expresses what I wish to insist 
on, and leaves open what I wish to leave open. How 
far in any particular district the vanquished were slain, 
how far they were simply driven out, we never can tell. 
It is enough that they were exterminated, got rid of in 
one way or another, within what now became the Eng- 
lish border. And I say exterminated as a race. No 
one could ever have said or believed, I am sure that I 
never said or believed, that every single British man, 
still less that every single British woman, was extermi- 
nated in either sense. In such cases some lucky ones 
among the conquered always contrive to make terms with 
the conquerors. At the other end, some, whether we call 
them lucky or unlucky, are spared to be the slaves of the 
conquerors. And women in all such cases are largely 
spared, though there is evidence to show that, in their 
great national migration, our forefathers largely brought 
their own women with them. But that some slaves and 
some women were spared is shown by the curious fact, 
noticed by philologers, that the very few Welsh words 
which have crept into English are names of small 
domestic objects such as women and slaves would 



134 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

bring with them. My proposition simply is, that none 
of these changes happened to such a degree as really 
to affect the practical purity of our Teutonic national 
being. We mus.t have taken in some Celtic infusion ; 
we may likely enough have taken in other infusions of 
other kinds. All that I maintain is that we took in no 
infusion so great as to make us another people in our 
second home from what we were in our first home. The 
simple facts of language, of nomenclature, of law and 
custom, prove that, though we cannot claim an impos- 
sible purity of blood, we can claim as near an approach 
to it as any other people that has played a considerable 
part in the world's history. As I said before, we are as 
pure as the High-Germans ; we are far purer than the 
French. We are not a Mischvolk, drawing its blood 
mainly from one source, while it draws its language from 
another source, and its national name from a third. We 
are still, both in Britain and in America, the same peo- 
ple that Hengest and Cerdic led from the lands which 
then bore the names of England and of Saxony. We 
have conquered and we have been conquered; we have 
settled in other lands and we have received settlers in 
our own land ; but we have done nothing, we have suf- 
fered nothing, to take from us a heritage which was ours 
before we left the cradles of our race. We have never 
cast aside, we have never exchanged, we have never, in 
the historian's view, essentially modified, the name, the 
tongue, the national being, with which we set forth on 
the first of our voyages to settle ourselves in the second 
of our homes. 



LECTURE V. 

Sfje 3Englte|) in tfjw jSccmtt? ?^ome. 

There is a picture well known on my side of the 
Atlantic, and doubtless still better known on yours, 
which represents the Pilgrim Fathers, to give them 
their received name, giving thanks for their safe landing 
on American soil. There is another familiar picture 
which represents a scene somewhat later in the history 
of the English people on this side of the Ocean ; it 
shows the founder of Pennsylvania buying the soil of 
his great colony from its Indian occupants. Here we 
have speaking memorials of what I have called the 
second voyage, the settlement in the third English 
home. I do not remember to have seen any such 
memorials of the first voyage, of the settlement in the 
second English home. I have indeed seen a picture 
described as " Vortigern and Rowena," and to those who 
look below the surface such a picture is not without 
meaning. I. need hardly tell you that no Englishwoman, 
nor, I presume, any woman of any other race, ever bore 
the purely imaginary name of Rowena either in the fifth 
century or in the twelfth — for the nineteenth I cannot 
answer. But the legend about the British duke and the 
daughter of the English ealdorman, a legend which so 
curiously turns about the foundation-legends of some 
other cities and nations, is not without its meaning. 

135 



136 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Elsewhere, whether at Massalia or in Virginia, the 
stranger woos the daughter of the native prince ; here 
the native prince woos the daughter of the stranger. 
That is a mythical way of saying that our Teutonic 
grandfathers brought our Teutonic grandmothers along 
with them ; and the late Dr. Rolleston had the privilege 
of seeing them in their old Teutonic graves. Such a 
scene, legendary as it is, was perhaps worth the paint- 
ing ; but surely the actual beginning of our second his- 
tory was better worth such a display than this romantic 
episode. Let American skill then, as a sign that the 
middle stage of our history is not forgotten on these 
shores, give us a worthy picture of the landing of Hen- 
gest at Ebbsfleet. The moment when the first English 
foot was pressed on British soil, the moment which con- 
tained within itself the germ of all that the English 
folk have done on either side of Ocean, might seem as 
well to deserve the exercise of the painter's skill as even 
the landing in the third home of the men who made 
the second voyage. The landing of Hengest has at least 
this claim of precedence over the landing of the Pilgrim 
Fathers, that the Pilgrim Fathers could not have made 
their voyage, at least not in the sort in which they did 
make it, if Hengest had not made his voyage before 
them. Otherwise, it might seem as if I could hardly 
directly compare the two events, the landing of Christian 
men of the seventeenth century in a heathen land, and 
the landing of heathen men of the fifth century in a 
Christian land. Yet, making allowance for this great 
difference, avoiding also anything like personal compar- 
ison between the shadowy outlines of the fifth century 
and the well-defined forms of the seventeenth, we shall 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 37 

see that in many things the settlements so far removed 
in time and place did their work in many things in very 
much the same way. In each case, by whatever means, 
the native inhabitants disappeared, and new English 
communities arose on the soil which had once been 
theirs. And in both cases those new English commu- 
nities reproduced, with such changes as changed cir- 
cumstances needed, the life of the land which they left 
behind. Here in New England indeed one might almost 
say that the settlers of the seventeenth century forsook 
in some things the English life of their own age, to fall 
back on the English life of the earlier time. The demo- 
cratic details of the early New England constitutions, 
the townships, the free general assemblies, the public 
land, the whole simple and primitive life of the colony, 
seem to carry us back to an earlier stage of Teutonic 
political history than the days of James and Charles the 
First. It is the old life, without the heathenism, the bar- 
barism, the constant waging of war. The ups and downs 
of the colonies, the constant shiftings, the unions, the 
divisions, remind us again of the like shiftings, the like 
unions, the like divisions, in the earlier day. Out of a 
crowd of scattered settlements arose in process of time 
the six States of the land which is specially the New 
England. So, out of a crowd of earlier scattered settle- 
ments were formed those few great kingdoms whose 
final union brought into being the single kingdom of 
the elder England. 

In Britain then, as in Germany, the Teutonic settlers 
established themselves according to those immemorial 
divisions which we find common to the whole Teutonic 
race, or rather to the whole Aryan family. We sat 



I38 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

down by marks, by hundreds, by gas or shires, answer- 
ing to the gentes, the ciiricz, the tribes, of primitive 
Rome. The shire, we must always remember, is an 
union of marks, and the kingdom is an union of shires. 
But the circumstances of new settlements planted on the 
soil of an enemy, the constant need of warfare, first against 
the Britons from whom more land was to be won or 
against whom the land already won had to be defended, 
then against rival settlements of their own race, no doubt 
caused union to be speedier, and led to the clothing 
of rulers with greater power, than was the case among 
those who stayed behind in the elder land. Long 
after the English conquest of Britain had begun, 
when nearly all land was occupied that ever was 
really occupied, it was noticed that the Old-Saxons of 
Germany had still no kings to rule over them. In the 
actual invasion of Britain kings had no share ; the lead- 
ers of the enterprise were ealdormen or heretogan. But 
mere ealdormen or heretogan they did not long remain 
in the conquered land; before the first generation of 
conquerors had died out, their chiefs had risen to the 
greater power and higher dignity of kings. And fur- 
ther still, as one English kingdom grew in power over 
others, a precarious and temporary supremacy over all 
the rest became vested in its sovereign. The power of 
the Bretwaldas, kings of this or that kingdom, holding 
a superiority more or less real over their fellows, may 
or may not have looked back to the Empire of the 
continental Caesars ; it certainly looked forward to the 
days when, first England and then Britain, should be 
an united realm. 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 39 

It would be impossible, and it would be needless if it 
were possible, to attempt even the faintest sketch of the 
general history of the English kingdom in the space of 
the present lecture. I will rather choose out some special 
points, some leading events, which have most to do with 
the growth of the English nation in its second home, 
and which may supply some special subjects of com- 
parison with its history and growth in its third home. 

The first great event then in the history of the Eng- 
lish people in Britain was their conversion to Christianity. 
That event in some sort brought Britain back again into 
that fellowship with the general Roman world from 
which the English conquest seemed to have altogether 
torn it away. But that such a conversion was needed is 
the greatest of all signs of the difference between Teu- 
tonic conquest in the island and in the mainland ; it is 
one of the strongest proofs that we are Englishmen of 
a truth. In Gaul and Spain there is no such plunge 
back into renewed heathendom ; Mars and Jupiter may 
have kept on some lingering votaries till the coming of 
Ataulf or of Hlodwig, but assuredly no Christian altars 
were overturned to make room for the altars of Thunder 
and Woden. But Thunder and Woden were the gods 
of the English folk till well nigh a hundred and fifty 
years after Hengest had set foot on Kentish soil. We 
have seen that our kinsfolk on the mainland were either 
already Christians when they made their entry or became 
Christians in the process of making it. Sooner or later, 
from heathendom or from heresy, they turned to the 
faith of their subjects ; they joined the Church which 
still lived on among them. They could easily learn 
from the subjects among whom they dwelled; we 



140 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

could hardly learn from those whom we slew or drove 
out of the land that we seized. To them we should have 
thought it scorn to listen ; we did not think it scorn to 
listen to teachers who came on an errand from the city 
which, fallen as it was, all men still looked up to as the 
head of Western Christendom. Disdaining in all ages 
to be subjects of the Roman Caesar, we did not disdain 
to become the disciples of the Roman Pontiff. When 
the first teachers from Rome had begun the work, other 
teachers from other quarters joined to go on with it. 
What the Roman planted the Frank and the Scot- 
watered ; the Briton, we must emphatically say, gave no 
help at all ; but we must no less emphatically add that it 
would have been hardly reasonable to expect that he 
should give any. 

By the conversion of the English to Christianity, 
Britain again entered the commonwealth of European 
nations. But it entered it, so far as its ruling people was 
concerned, as a purely Teutonic land. It is indeed 
wonderful to see how little direct change the conversion 
made. Take a small point in itself, but one of the best 
ways of judging of the general workings of men's minds : 
look at our personal nomenclature. Some other nations, 
the Scandinavians for instance, seem at once on their con- 
version to have taken to the use of scriptural and saintly 
names. In England it is hardly too much to say that they 
remained utterly unknown. The few cases of men called 
John or Thomas or the like before the Norman Conquest 
might almost be counted on one's fingers, and the scrip- 
tural name seems never to have been a real name given in 
baptism, but an adopted name taken by a monk or other 
churchman on his ordination or his entering religion. The 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 141 

laity without exception, the clergy with very few excep- 
tions, clave to the old Teutonic nomenclature of our own 
people, that nomenclature which after the Norman Con- 
quest largely gave way, partly to scriptural and saintly 
names, partly to a nomenclature distinct from our own, 
but equally Teutonic. Then men ceased to be called 
Godwine and ^Ethelwulf, and began to be called, some- 
times Robert and William, sometimes John and Peter. 
In language we naturally received a further Roman 
infusion into our vocabulary. We adopted a number 
of technical ecclesiastical terms ; and most likely a fresh 
stock of names of objects of Roman civilization were 
brought in by our Roman teachers. It is sometimes 
hard to tell, out of the small list of Latin words which 
are quoted to prove that Englishmen are something other 
than Englishmen, which came in in the days of Hengest 
and which in the days of Augustine. But at both times 
we adopted as few as we could ; we translated as many as 
we could, even of the most hallowed names of the Church. 
To the English convert the Founder of his faith was not 
the Saviour, but the Healer ; he did not receive baptism, 
but fulluht ; he did not look for a resurrection, but for an 
again-rising. The cross became the rood ; it is startling 
to read in Old-English sacred song that Christ was 
hanged on a gallows. We need not go much further 
to prove how thoroughly Teutonic were the speech and 
the feelings of men who adopted the lessons of their 
teachers from Rome and Tarsus in such a garb as this. 
There are again some likenesses between the early 
laws of England and the laws of Rome, which have been 
held to prove a large adoption of Roman institutions by 
the English conquerors from the beginning. Now, just 
10 



142 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

as in the case of language, some of these likenesses 
are really nothing but cases of common Aiyan posses- 
sion by England and Rome which have been mistaken 
for direct borrowing by England from Rome. Others 
again are simply cases of like causes leading to like 
effects. But in some cases there is little doubt that 
Roman institutions were brought into England by the 
teachers of Christianity. Making a will seems to us 
now so obvious a matter that we find it hard to con- 
ceive a state of things in which it is an exceptional act, 
needing a special confirmation by the legislature. Yet so 
it has certainly been among many nations. The earliest 
principle is that at a man's death his goods revert to the 
commonwealth, or pass as the custom of the common- 
wealth ordains. If their owner wishes to keep any con- 
trol over them after his own death, he must get special 
leave from the commonwealth. As time goes on, as the 
convenience of the power of bequest is generally felt, 
the confirmation of a man's will by the general assembly 
first becomes a matter of form, and then goes out of use 
altogether. So, in the early days of Rome, the will of 
a Roman patrician had to be confirmed by. the assembly 
of the curies, the assembly of the whole patrician order. 
At first, we may be sure, the assembly exercised a real 
power of accepting or rejecting. Gradually the thing 
became a mere form ; the will was approved as a matter 
of course, and that, not by the curies themselves, but by 
thirty lictors who were held to represent them. Now 
we may be sure that this process, or something like it, 
has been gone through independently in many lands. 
Men made their wills at Rome and they made them at 
Athens, but there is no reason to think that Rome bor- 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 43 

rowed the practice of will-making from Athens. And 
I believe that we might in the same way have devised 
the power of bequest for ourselves as soon as it was 
found that the power of bequest was an useful thing, 
without needing to go to Rome to learn it. But, as a 
matter of fact, there is some reason to think that the 
practice of bequest was learned by our forefathers from 
Roman teachers. But assuredly they did not learn it 
from Romans who abode in Britain through the Ene- 
lish Conquest, but from the Romans who came to teach 
us the later faith of Rome. If this be so, this is a 
type of the kind of influence which the conversion 
exercised upon us. The heathen faith and worship had 
of course to be put aside altogether ; but in other things 
the new teaching did little in the way of changing or 
abolishing; it did but set up some new things along- 
side of the old ones. The Christian Church and its 
ministers received a legal position ; each kingdom or 
principality had its bishop, who in no way displaced the 
king or ealdorman, but took his place alongside of him. 
The boundaries of the kingdom or principality became 
the boundaries of the bishop's diocese, and, as king- 
doms and shires shifted more than bishoprics did, the 
boundaries of the dioceses became in Britain, as in Gaul, 
the best guide to the earlier geography of the country. 
But here again, as in everything else, the difference be- 
tween the two conquests strikes us. The English diocese 
represented the extent of an English principality, owing its 
being to the English conquest. The French diocese repre- 
sented the extent of the jurisdiction of a Roman city which 
lived on undisturbed through the Frankish conquest. 
In early Christian England the conversion was so peace- 



144 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

fill, so thorough, it so easily adapted itself to the existing 
state of things, that the Church and the nation simply 
became two names for the same body of men looked at 
in two different characters. The Church was the nation 
on its knees in worship, as the army was the nation 
girded for battle. And the conversion worked mightily 
towards the union of the divided, and often hostile, king- 
doms of Teutonic Britain into a single nation. It gave 
them a common organization and a common head. The 
Church of England had a common Primate and a com- 
mon synod long before the people of England had a 
common king and a common assembly. The Archbishop 
of Canterbury held a more ancient office than the King 
of the English : he was the head of Angle-kin before 
Englishmen had a common king. And the kings, 
beyond all doubt, received in many things a new cha- 
racter and position through the conversion. Christian- 
ity is not favourable to distinctions of birth ; least of all 
can it regard distinctions of birth which are founded on 
supposed descent from the gods of heathendom. The 
king had therefore to put aside his ancient holiness as 
the son of Woden, and to put on a new form of holiness 
as the anointed of the Lord. He was now admitted to 
his office with the religious rites of unction and coro- 
nation. His office was thus declared, more distinctly 
than it had been in the days of heathendom, to be essen- 
tially an office, an office which was bestowed according 
to law, and which might be taken away according to 
law. The king was not holier than the bishop, and the 
bishop was elected, and might be deposed. It was a dis- 
tinct political gain that, in ages when everything else 
tended to increase the royal power, the very means which 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 14$ 

made the king's office more holy and venerable did at 
the same time more clearly proclaim it as an office which, 
like other offices, was given and might be taken away. 

In other matters the conversion left our Teutonic 
institutions to themselves, to abide or to change accord- 
ing to influences on which the change of religion had 
no direct bearing. The general relations between a man 
and his lord, between a king and his people, the tenure 
of land, the wergild or price of blood, the fcehde or 
right of self-defence, the old divisions of eorl and ccorl, 
the newer nobility of the tkegn, — all that belonged to 
general Teutonic life, all that specially belonged to Teu- 
tonic life in the conquered isle of Britain, — all went on, 
all remained untouched, changing, growing, develop- 
ing, as it was natural that it should change, grow, and 
develope. War did not cease, whether wars with the 
Britons or wars among the rival English kingdoms. 
But here came in the most direct effect of the conver- 
sion on the general history of the island. The wars of 
the converted Teuton ceased to be wars of extermina- 
tion : therefore, in those parts of Britain which the Eng- 
lish won after their conversion, a real British element 
was assimilated into the English mass. 

Now I was amused a few months back by reading in 
a periodical published in England — I am not quite sure 
whether the contributor is of British or American birth 
— that this last was a fact which I " grudgingly admitted." 
To be sure, my critic was one who jumbled together Wes- 
sex and Mercia, Ine and Offa, as if I should charge an 
astronomer with grudging something to the satellites 
of Jupiter, when he was really talking about Saturn or 



I46 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Uranus. To be sure, he was one who thought that it 
went some way to prove that Englishmen were not 
Englishmen to say that Daniel O'Connell was an Irish- 
man. Yet the writer of whom I speak writes in many 
places, and therefore, I presume, he has many readers. 
Perhaps I may have some readers too ; but it is clear 
that I cannot number my critic among them. For this 
point which I am said to admit grudgingly is just 
one of those on which I have always insisted most 
emphatically. I have been led to insist on it by local 
and personal circumstances. I can hardly say that it is 
a point of my own finding out, but it is a point which 
has been specially brought home to my own personal 
knowledge. In my own shire of Somerset I live on the 
slope of a hill which, like half the hills of that shire, 
bears a Celtic name. Perhaps if I lived elsewhere, I 
might be less keenly aware of the long existence of a 
British remnant in the western shires, and I might have 
less fully understood the witness to that fact which is 
supplied by the ancient laws, not of Mercian Offa, accord- 
ing to the dream of my critic, who has read neither me 
nor the laws, but of West-Saxon Ine. I mention this 
little bit of criticism just to show the kind of difficulty 
under which we students and writers of history labour. 
About astronomy and chemistry I believe people do not 
speak, unless they know something of those subjects. 
I at least, who know nothing whatever of those sub- 
jects, should not venture to say a word about them. 
For I know that, if I talked about those subjects, I 
should be certain to talk nonsense. Least of all should 
I think of taking the name of a chemical or astronom- 
ical writer whose writings I had not read, and putting 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 47 

into his mouth some statement about his own subject 
which he had never made. But about history and phi- 
lology everybody thinks he may talk, whether he has 
studied those subjects or* not; men are not the least 
kept back from talking by the certainty of talking 
nonsense if they have not studied them. So it comes 
that I find myself charged by those who cannot have 
read what I have written with saying things which I 
never did say, with saying grudgingly things on which I 
have insisted emphatically and systematically. And I 
am further made to defend my imaginary positions by 
references to imaginary laws for which Wilkins and 
Thorpe and Schmid have found no place in their great 
collections. 

The fact which I am supposed to admit grudgingly is 
in truth one of the greatest importance for a right know- 
ledge of the progress of the English Conquest and of 
its results. The laws of Ine, King of the West-Saxons, 
dating from the eighth century, set before us a state of 
things in the West-Saxon kingdom which has nothing 
like it either in our earlier or our later records. It is 
very likely that, if we had any laws of Offa, King of the 
Mercians, later in the same century, they would set be- 
fore us nearly the same state of things ; but unluckily 
we have not got any such laws to make us quite sure. 
That state of things is one in which Briton and English- 
man appear as living side by side in the land, subjects 
of the same king, protected by the same law, but still 
marked off in everything, the one as the conquering, the 
other as the conquered, race. In the old Teutonic polity 
every man had his price — not in the sense falsely attrib- 
uted to Sir Robert Walpole, but in quite another. He 



148 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

had his value according to his rank; every man was 
worth something ; but a man of higher rank was held to 
be worth more than a man of lower rank, till we come 
up to the king, who is held to be worth a very great sum 
indeed. The price of blood for a slain thegn was equal 
to the price of blood for several slain churls, and the 
oath of a thegn counted for as much as the oaths of 
several churls. Now, in the laws of Ine, the blood and 
the oath of a Briton of a certain rank is systematically 
rated at a lower price than the blood and the oath of an 
Englishman of the same rank. And there are provisions 
in the same code which show us Britons, not as slaves, 
not as strangers, as men fully under the living protection 
of the law, but still as forming a class distinct from 
Englishmen and inferior to Englishmen. Now what 
does all this prove ? We must remember that there is 
nothing like this legislation of Ine's either in the earlier 
or in the later laws, neither in the older laws of Kent 
nor in the later laws of Wessex. The picture of a land 
inhabited by two nations still keeping perfectly distinct 
belongs only to the legislation of Wessex at one parti- 
cular time, the time which followed the first conquests 
made by the West-Saxons in their new character of 
Christians. The lawgivers of Kent had no Britons to 
legislate about ; in Kent, a land conquered in the days 
of heathendom, the British inhabitants had been rooted 
out. The later lawgivers of Wessex might have to 
legislate about British enemies or British captives ; they 
had not to legislate about a settled British population in 
their own kingdom. It is plain that conversion to Chris- 
tianity, though it did not stop warfare, made warfare less 
frightful. The Christian conqueror did not seek the ex- 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 49 

termination of his conquered enemies ; he was satisfied 
with their political subjection. In the lands conquered 
after the conversion the Briton lived on much as the 
Roman lived on in Gaul. We see him there in the time 
of Ine, free, protected by the law, but marked as the 
inferior of his conqueror. When ^Elfred gave laws to 
Wessex, things had changed ; the conquerors had assim- 
ilated the conquered ; the British inhabitants of Wessex 
had passed into Englishmen. 

It is plain then that, in the shires of Somerset and 
Devon, the lands for which this legislation of Ine must 
have been mainly meant, a considerable part of the peo- 
ple must be English by adoption only. Cornwall, I need 
hardly say, was a strictly British land, with a British no- 
menclature, and a British speech which lingered on into 
the last century. These lands were long known as the 
Wealh-cyn, the land of the Welsh or British people. 
There is then an undoubted British infusion in the Eng- 
lish people, an infusion dating from the seventh century. 
The fact is undoubted ; it is open to any one to make 
what inferences he chooses from it. Only let him stop 
and think whether the lands from Elbe to Niemen have 
not poured a greater foreign infusion into the blood of 
Germany than the lands from Axe to Tamar have poured 
into the blood of England. My inferences are these : 
The presence of legislation about Britons in the laws of 
Ine, compared with its absence in the earlier laws, points 
to the difference between heathen conquest which involved 
the extermination of the conquered and Christian con- 
quest which did not. And it thereby teaches us how 
thorough the extermination was in the days of heathen- 
dom. On the other hand, the fact that the conquered 



150 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

were thoroughly assimilated by the conquerors between 
the beginning of the eighth century and the end of the 
ninth shows that the speech and the civilization of Rome 
had utterly passed away from Western Britain in the 
seventh century. Britons might be assimilated by their 
English conquerors ; the analogy of other lands forbids 
us to believe that such a change could have happened 
to men who kept aught of the speech and feelings of 
Romans. The fact therefore which I am supposed to 
admit so grudgingly, but on which I do in truth insist 
right willingly, goes far to prove the doctrines for which 
I am arguing — the doctrine that the English Conquest 
was, up to the time of the conversion, strictly a con- 
quest of extermination, and further, that it was strictly 
a British and not a Roman people who were there to 
be exterminated. 

Thus in the seventh century, and no doubt for some 
time later, the English mass did receive a foreign in- 
fusion ; we took in some strangers whom we made our 
own by the law of adoption and assimilation. Presently, 
in the ninth and tenth centuries, the English who had 
thus invaded the land of the Britons were themselves 
invaded in the land which they had made their own. 
In a considerable part of England the conquerors them- 
selves became the conquered. A new nomenclature was 
brought in : through a large part of several English 
shires the names which the English had given to the 
spots which they wrested from the Briton gave way to 
new names which marked the coming of another race 
of conquerors. Wherever names end in by, we see the 
signs of this new revolution, the signs of the coming 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 151 

of a new element in the land, an element which indeed 
supplied a wide field for adoption, but which hardly 
stood in need of assimilation. As the English came 
on the Britons, so the Danes came on the English ; they 
occupied a considerable part of England; in the end 
they placed a Danish king on the throne of what by 
that time had become the united English kingdom. 
Such an event as this is a mighty one, filling no small 
space in a narrative history of the English people. A 
conquest, a heathen conquest, the invasion of a Chris- 
tian land by men who still clave to the gods whom the 
land which they invaded had cast aside, it enables us, in 
its recorded details, better to understand one side of that 
earlier settlement of the English themselves of which so 
few details have been recorded. But, in such a sketch 
as I am now setting before you, the great tale of the 
Danish invasions goes for but little. Misleading as such 
a view would be in an ordinary history, I might for my 
present purpose almost venture to speak of the Danish 
conquest as the last wave of the English conquest, as 
the coming of a detachment who came so late that they 
could settle only at the expense of their comrades who 
had settled already. For the Danes were a kindred folk 
to the English, hardly differing more from some of the 
tribes which had taken a part in the English conquest 
than those tribes differed from one another. The coming 
of the Dane hardly amounted to more than the addition 
of a fourth Teutonic element to the Angles, Saxons, and 
Jutes who had come already. The kindred Dane, speak- 
ing a kindred tongue, needed only conversion to Chris- 
tianity to make him in all respects the fellow of the 
Englishman. The Dane was converted; he sank into 



152 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

the general mass of Englishmen; his tongue became 
simply one of the local dialects of English. As I 
before said, he was adopted; but, as I also said, he 
was already so like ourselves that he hardly needed to 
be assimilated. 

The Danish settlement was hardly over when another 
invader came, an invader, as it might seem, of quite 
another kind, and who came to do quite another work. 
A Norman duke claimed and won the crown of Eng 
land, and parted out the broadest lands, the highest 
offices, of the English realm among his foreign fol- 
lowers. So much history tells us ; romance goes on to 
tell how he came, with his speech, his laws, his man- 
ners, his system of government, all strange, foreign, 
in all things unlike those of England — to subdue 
the English land, to make bondmen of the English 
people, to root out all that was English, to put in its 
place all that was Norman. On this matter let me speak 
as one who has given the main work of his life to show 
that no such event ever took place. I have indeed 
laboured in vain, if I have failed to show that the legend- 
ary conception of the Norman Conquest as an uproot- 
ing, as even an overshadowing, of the ancient national 
life of England is a legendary conception indeed. I am 
the last man to undervalue the greatness of that mighty 
event, either in itself or in its results. But its results were 
not such as these. When I look to the Teutonic lands of 
the European mainland, I am thankful that the Norman 
came to enable both the second and the third England 
to keep on far more of the old Teutonic life than they 
have done. Writing, as I chance to write, on the very 
anniversary of the great battle, I can rejoice even in the 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 53 

arrow that pierced the eye of England's king and cham- 
pion, as I see that, in the long and strange course of later 
days, the death of Harold did more than his life could 
have done to keep England a Teutonic land and its folk 
a Teutonic people. I venture to see in the Norman Con- 
queror a friend disguised in the garb of an enemy. I see 
in William the Great, to give back to him the worthier 
title of his own day, not the destroyer of English law, 
of English freedom, of all that makes England Eng- 
land, of all that makes this land a New England in 
deed as well as in name, but their unwitting preserver. 
And I may add that, though he doubtless had no fixed 
purpose to preserve, he assuredly had no fixed purpose 
to destroy. Such men as he, the giants of our common 
nature, have no need to stoop to destruction. He had no 
need to uproot the forms of our ancient freedom, when, 
without uprooting them, he knew how to make all 
things and all men obey his will as no king before him 
or after him could do. And so the forms lived on, to 
be once more clothed with substance in a happier day. 
William himself wore a crown which in truth he won 
by the sword at the head of foreign invaders. But it 
was a crown which he claimed as his own by a pretended 
lawful inheritance ; it was a crown which in the end was 
given him with the strictest outward observance of every 
lawful form, by the election of the English people, by 
the consecration of the English Church. The sons of 
William wore the English crown as a crown which the 
English people had made fast to them in successful war 
against Norman rebels. The freedom of England lived 
through the storm, because the Norman kings found the 
means of reigning as practical despots under its forms. 



154 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Some branches of the old tree might seem to be lopped 
away ; but the root kept on the old life, and was present- 
ly able to put forth new branches crowned with richer 
fruit than they had ever borne before. The new life of 
the English nation was first schooled and strengthened 
in struggles on behalf of a foreign king against nobles 
more foreign than he. It was again more thoroughly 
schooled and strengthened in struggles in which nobles 
who had ceased to be foreign became the true leaders 
of the people against a king who remained a stranger. 
In the strifes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the 
old forms of freedom were gradually shaped into new 
forms better suited to the altered state of things. By 
the end of the thirteenth century, the English con- 
stitution, in its most essential features, had come into 
being. The system which other European nations 
have been content to copy and to borrow stood 
forth, at once young and old. On this side of Ocean 
I may not speak of copying or of borrowing. Men 
do not copy themselves ; they do not borrow their 
birthright. All that our common fathers won in the 
struggles of those great ages was won for all branches 
of the English folk alike. Our common fathers handed 
on an equal right in their heritage to both branches of 
their severed descendants. As the apostle says that 
Levi, still in the loins of his father, paid tithe in Abra- 
ham, so I may say, following the same figure, that 
Washington and Hamilton worked out the freedom of 
the younger as well as the elder England in the loins of 
Earl Simon and King Edward. 

But it may still be argued ; Let it be that the Norman 
Conquest was in a wonderful way turned to the gain of 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 55 

English freedom ; but did not the Norman Conquest 
none the less bring with it a settlement of strangers, of 
Romance-speaking strangers, enough to destroy all 
pretence on the part of the English nation to pure 
Teutonic descent ? And, above all, did they not bring 
in such changes in language as to destroy all pretence 
on the part of the English language to be looked on as 
a pure Teutonic tongue ? Are not we — and my we takes 
in you — rather a mixed people, a people compounded 
of two elements, Saxon and Norman ? Do we not 
speak a mixed language, the English language, a lan- 
guage made up of two elements, Anglo-Saxon and Nor- 
man-French ? Now in talk of this kind a great part of 
the error arises from mere confusion of language, which 
a little wholesome pedantry might get rid of. But there 
is also some misconception of fact. First of all, who 
and what were the Normans ? May I answer in an epi- 
grammatic saying of my own, which is already in print, 
but which I am vain enough to think will bear saying 
twice ? The Norman then was a Dane who had stayed 
a little time in Gaul to put on a slight French varnish, 
and who came into England to be washed clean again. 
The Dane who came straight from Denmark had put on 
no such varnish, and needed no such cleaning. The 
Danes who had wrested the coast of the French duchy 
from its own dukes and kings, who had shut up those 
dukes and kings in an inland city, but who in so doing 
had taken to the tongue and the manners of the land in 
which they had settled— those, in short, who had changed 
from Northmen into Normans, — still remained kinsmen, 
though they may have forgotten the kindred ; but they 
had put on the garb of strangers, and in that garb they 



156 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

came among us. Our work was to strip them of that 
foreign garb, to bring to light the true brotherhood that 
lurked beneath, to bring back the Saxon of Bayeux and 
the Dane of Coutances to his natural place alongside 
of the Saxon of Winchester and the Dane of York, to 
teach even the more deeply Romanized Norman of 
Rouen to come back once more to the Teutonic hearth 
which he had forsaken. And the work was not a hard 
one. Legend indeed tells of a long and bitter division 
of centuries between " Saxons and Normans " in Eng- 
land; history, which knows nothing of any opposition 
between " Saxons and Normans " under those names in 
any time or place, can only record with wonder the speed 
with which, both the actual Norman conquerors and 
the peaceful Norman settlers who came in their wake, 
were absorbed into the general mass of Englishmen. 
In opposition to all the pictures of romance, I can go 
only by the direct contemporary statement, borne out 
by every kind of incidental witness, that, before the end 
of the twelfth century, Normans and English could no 
longer be distinguished. Of course this does not mean 
that men had forgotten who they were, that they did not 
know whether their forefathers had fought under William 
or under Harold. It does mean that all practical distinc- 
tion was wiped out ; it means that the conquerors and 
the conquered had ceased to be distinct, much more to 
be hostile, classes, or rather nations, on the same soil ; 
they had been fused together into one united nation. 
The peculiar circumstances of the Norman Conquest, 
not least among them the personal wisdom of the great 
Conqueror, did much to make such a work easier, but 
we may be sure that it was also made easier by the real, 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 57 

if forgotten, kindred between the two bodies which were 
to be fused together. But mark the form which the 
fusion took : the smaller Norman body was absorbed in 
the greater English body ; it was not a co-ordinate ele- 
ment, but an infusion into a body already in being. The 
English did not become Normans, but the Normans be- 
came English. In becoming English, they doubtless 
modified the English mass into which they were ab- 
sorbed, and they modified it far more largely than it had 
been modified by the assimilation of a certain body of 
Britons in Wessex or the adoption of a certain body of 
Danes in Northumberland. The Englishman who lived 
after the Norman had come could never again be quite 
the same as the Englishman had been who lived before 
his coming. But the change was mainly on the outside; 
the Normans in a wonderfully short time became Eng- 
lishmen in every essential point, worthy fellow-workers 
with Englishmen of older settlement in preserving, in 
restoring, under new forms, but without any change of 
substance, all that it was well to preserve and to restore 
in the England of the days before they came. 

The change, I have said, that the Normans wrought 
was mainly on the outside. In the matter of law, and 
of all that gathers about law and its administration, the 
features which distinguish England before the Norman 
Conquest from England after it are many and important. 
And they are results of the Norman Conquest, though 
not perhaps in the way which those words would at first 
sight suggest. Such changes as were made were not, 
for the most part, things which the Normans brought 
over ready made from Normandy, as we brought our 
11 



158 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

old Teutonic institutions ready made from the oldest 
England. They were changes which, under the cir- 
cumstances of the Norman rule in England, grew up 
on English ground. I trust that no one now believes, 
as Blackstone once believed, that William the Con- 
\ queror introduced a ready-made feudal system into 
England. Still less, I would hope, does any one be- 
lieve that he introduced it by that great law of Salis- 
bury which for ever hindered any feudal system, in the 
sense which those words would bear in other lands, from 
growing up in England. 

But of all outside changes, that which is most striking 
at first sight, and than which few are more important in 
very truth, is the change in language. Mark that I say 
change in language, not change #/" language. There was 
no change of language ; one language was not made to 
give way to another. In one sense, partially and for a 
time, one language did give way to another ; that is to 
say, English did for a while, for some purposes, give 
way to French. What I mean is that there was no time 
when a so-called Anglo-Saxon language gave way to a 
so-called English language, a mixed language made up 
out of Teutonic and Romance elements. There are no 
mixed languages ; a language is whatever its grammar is, 
even though foreign infusions into its vocabulary may, 
as in some languages has really happened, outnumber 
its native store. Not that the English language needs 
to rest its claim to an unbroken continuity between its 
earliest and its latest forms on any such ground as this. 
The effects of the Norman Conquest on language were 
gradual and indirect. The Normans brought with them 
into England the French tongue, which they had adopt- 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 59 

ed instead of their native Scandinavian. For a while 
both languages, French and English, lived on side by 
side, English as the popular, French as the polite, lan- 
guage, while Latin lived by the side of both as the 
tongue of learning. The notion that William the Con- 
queror or any other Norman king tried to root out the 
English tongue, that he made French the tongue of 
government, is so far from history that it is hardly 
romance ; it is pure fiction. William himself tried to 
learn English ; he took care that his English-born son 
Henry should learn it as his natural speech ; Henry the 
Second, a king neither English nor Norman, but Ange- 
vin, whether he spoke it or not, certainly understood it. 
After the Norman Conquest, English gradually goes out 
of use in public documents ; but it gives way, not to 
French, but to the Latin which, ever since the conver- 
sion of the English to Christianity, had been used along- 
side of English. By the end of the twelfth century, 
English was undoubtedly in familiar use among all 
classes in England. Then came a time which we may 
call a French period of language, as distinguished from 
a Norman period. A tide of fashion set in in favour 
of French in the England of the thirteenth century, just 
as happened in Germany, Russia, and other European 
countries in much later times. Nor was such a fashion 
wonderful. The Kings of England at the beginning of 
that century were not only Kings of England, not only 
Kings of England and Dukes of Normandy, but masters 
of a French-speaking dominion far greater than that of 
the King of France himself. The hereditary attachments 
of those kings lay in Anjou and Aquitaine far more than 
in England, or even in Normandy. Meanwhile a crowd 



160 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

of events, the crusades prominent among them, had 
spread the French tongue to the utmost bounds of 
Europe and beyond the bounds of Europe ; it was the 
polite and courtly speech from Dunfermline to Jerusa- 
lem. It is not wonderful then that, just at the moment 
when it seemed likely to give way to English, just at the 
moment when its ascendency as the tongue of the con- 
quering Norman was over, it gained a new ascendency as 
a courtly and fashionable speech. But English all the 
while remained the popular speech, the one speech of 
the mass of the people, a speech perfectly familiar to the 
mass of those who spoke French as a matter of fashion. 
A reaction naturally set in, and it was no doubt strength- 
ened by the long wars with France, which brought 
French and English nationality into more direct oppo- 
sition, and gave French, in the eyes of patriotic Eng- 
lishmen, the air of a hostile tongue. By the end of the 
fourteenth century English was again the one ordinary 
speech of England ; French was a foreign tongue used 
only for special purposes. Its use in public documents, 
unknown in the really Norman days, began, with other 
French fashions, in the thirteenth century ; from the lat- 
ter years of the fourteenth it gradually died, if it can be 
said to have quite died out. For a few French phrases 
still linger in the set forms of English law and govern- 
ment, and therefore a few such survivals linger still on 
this side of the Ocean also. 

Thus the English tongue, which had ceased to be a 
polite and courtly speech in the second half of the 
eleventh century, came back again to be a polite and 
courtly speech in the second half of the fourteenth. It 
had undergone what we may call a three hundred years' 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. l6l 

banishment Through all that time it had lived on as 
strictly the vulgar tongue, while two other tongues held 
a higher place, the one as the polite, the other as the 
learned, language. This position of our language is not 
wholly without parallelism in modern Europe. The posi- 
tion of Welsh in Wales is something, but not exactly, 
like it; the position of the Slavonic tongues in a large 
part of the lands on the Hadriatic sea is more like it. 
English remained the tongue of common discourse ; 
with the mass of the people it was the only tongue 
of common discourse. It was the tongue of popular 
rimes and popular religious writings, the tongue very 
often of political satire, but not the tongue of either 
speaking or writing for any purpose of supposed culture 
and refinement. It suffered the kind of changes which 
were likely to happen to a language so placed. Its 
grammatical inflexions broke down ; it took in a great 
number of borrowed words from the rival tongue which 
was deemed more polite. Now in this matter, as in many 
others, the Norman Conquest did but strengthen and 
hasten the working of -causes which were at work 
already. The loss of inflexions is in no way pecu- 
liar to English ; it has affected all the other Teutonic 
tongues more or less ; some of them, above all the kin- 
dred Frisian, without the help of any Norman Conquest, 
without the help of foreign influences of any kind, have 
been affected by it fully as much as English has been. 
What specially distinguishes English is the vast Ro- 
mance infusion which it has taken into its vocabulary at 
various times from the eleventh century to the nineteenth, 
but in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries perhaps more 
than in any other. But even in this there is nothing dis- 



1 62 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

tinctive except the amount of the infusion. Other Teu- 
tonic tongues have adopted some Romance words ; the 
modern High-Dutch is at this day adopting them at a 
rate which cannot be pleasing to any lover of the old 
Teutonic speech in any of its forms. We had ourselves 
adopted some Latin words before the eleventh century, 
more, in fact, than we adopted in the eleventh and twelfth. 
But undoubtedly neither any other Teutonic language, 
nor our own language at any earlier stage, ever adopted 
so many Romance words as we have done from the four- 
teenth century onward. And we have done something 
beyond merely adopting a great infusion of foreign words 
at some particular times. We have picked up a habit of 
adopting foreign words without the least need. We have 
taken in a vast number of foreign words as names for 
things for which we had perfectly good English names ; 
we go on doing so still. And we have gone far to lose — 
happily we have not quite lost — the power of making 
new words in our own tongue when we want a new 
name for a new thing. Our tongue is crowded with 
strange and needless names for new thoughts, new 
inventions, new sciences, which it would have been 
just as easy to name in our own tongue. The 'ologies 
wax more and more daily, because men find it easier 
to run to their Greek lexicon than to think in their own 
tongue. But I am not without hope, as long as I can 
cross the Ocean in a steamship and go my way by land 
on a railroad. Those are words which the lips of vElfred 
might have been fain to frame. 

But great as all this is, it is all change in language, 
not change ^/"language ; it is all change which has taken 
place within a language which has never lost what we 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 163 

may call its unbroken personal identity. There was no 
time-when a so-called English language displaced a so- 
called Anglo-Saxon language. There has been one lan- 
guage, call it English, Anglo-Saxon, or anything else, 
spoken throughout. It is of some importance that no 
man at any time, in the eleventh century, the fourteenth, 
or any other, would have called the language which he 
spoke by any name but English ; it is of much more 
importance that the language which they spoke remain- 
ed one language throughout all changes. The changes 
were made, one by one, in an existing tongue ; the for- 
eign words were adopted, one by one, into an existing 
tongue. But the tongue itself did not change ; it kept 
its Teutonic grammar ; it kept its essentially Teutonic 
vocabulary. Ingenious men have tried to show that in 
the present English vocabulary there are more Romance 
words than Teutonic. Likely enough it is so in the way 
in which they go to work. They take a modern dic- 
tionary ; they count the words, and they say that they 
find more Romance words there than Teutonic. Let 
it be so ; what then ? Let us try the words — non 
numcro, sed pondere. Let us weigh them, I do not 
say by their weight in syllables, a test which would 
certainly go against me, but by their real weight and 
value for purposes of speech. The Teutonic words 
are all of them real words, words which we are always 
wanting, words which, if their use were forbidden, would 
leave us altogether dumb. The Romance words are 
some of them words which we cannot do without for 
some particular purposes, but which are not, by the first 
needs of speech, always on our lips : some of them are 
words which we might perfectly well do without ; some 



164 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

of them are words which, for the general purposes of 
language, are not words at all. The professors of par- 
ticular sciences have a perfect right to use for their own 
particular purposes any technical terms, formed from 
any language, which they may think good. But I deny 
that those technical terms, which millions of us go 
through the world without ever hearing or uttering, are 
any real part of language. They are not words in the 
same sense as the words which clothe the thoughts 
without which the speech of men cannot go on at all. 
Let there be a Romance majority in this or that dic- 
tionary. That majority is, I doubt not, swelled by tri- 
gonometry, trignometrical, trigonometrically ; it contains 
zootomy and zygodaciylous ; it takes in helminthology , 

\ which is in English zvorm-talk, and entomology \ which 
is in English bug-talk. I should not be surprised if it 
takes in all the healing things in the pharmacopoeia ; I 
can believe that it takes in the jargon of diplomacy, the 
prestige and the pourparlers, the rapprochements and the 
denouements, the offices for which plain English cannot 
find a name, the attaches and the charges d'affaires, and 
the imbroglios and the fiascos into which they lead unwary 
nations. Nay, I should not wonder if it took in the jargon 
of advertisements, the rliypophagon soap and the rhadio- 
graphic pen. In the Teutonic minority we have those old 
and dear and hallowed words without which no speech 
can be a speech at all, the words with which we clothe our 

) inmost thoughts, the words of worship, the words of love, 
the words of the fireside, the words of the highest ora- 
tory and the highest poetry. In that minority come 
the names of God and man, of father and mother, of 
son and daughter, of wife and husband. It takes in the 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 165 

names of heaven and earth, of land and sea, of sun and 
moon ; it takes in the bread we eat, the water we drink, 
the clothes we wear, the plough with which we till the 
furrow, the ship that bears us on the wave, the horse 
that we ride or drive, the cow that gives us milk, the 
sheep that give us wool, and the trusty dog that 
watches them. In the minority too are all those parts 
of speech, those pronouns, those particles, those verbs 
of every moment's use, without which speech would at 
once break down. We can put together sentence after 
sentence of clear and strong English without a single 
Romance word; we cannot form the shortest really 
complete grammatical sentence without Teutonic words. 
Where then is the real majority ? Let us reckon afresh, 
but let us reckon by another standard. The Roman 
may have the greater number in a show of hands of 
slaves, strangers, barbarians, trooping in from all cor- 
ners of the world ; the Teuton will win at the poll 
where the votes of duly qualified citizens alone are 
reckoned. 

Whatever then the Norman did, whatever came of 
the many and great consequences of his coming, he 
did not wipe out, he did not change, he did not even 
undermine, the national life of the English people. He 
modified our law ; he modified our language : he did 
not destroy either; he did not stop the unbroken life 
of either. A day came when men of Norman blood, 
thoroughly changed into Englishmen on English soil, 
could be the worthy leaders of the English people. 
Sons of the soil, of either race, rose against the foreign 
favorites of foreign-hearted Kings. The Great Charter 



1 66 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

was wrested from John by the descendants of the men 
who fought for William, working hand in hand with the 
descendants of the men who fought for Harold. In the 
struggle against the foreign favourites of foreign-hearted 
kings, all earlier grievances, all earlier differences, were 
forgotten. We could even choose as a national leader, 
one who through Norman female descent had a claim to 
English honours, but who by birth and direct descent 
was neither English nor Norman, but strictly French. 
The champion of our rights, the martyr of our freedom, 
the man who lived and died for England, whom when 
alive Englishmen followed as a leader, whom when dead, 
in the teeth of the ban of Rome, they worshipped as a 
saint, whose praise was sung on English lips, in Latin 
and French and English, was, as I have already hinted, 
our own by adoption only, but by adoption our own in 
the truest sense. Two men of the thirteenth century 
gave the law and constitution of England that later form 
which the work of six hundred years on both sides 
of the Ocean has been, not to pull down, not to build 
afresh, but simply to reform in detail, as reform in detail 
has been called for by the circumstances of this age or 
the other. By a strange decree of destiny the man who 
finished the work was the slayer of him who began it. 
The victor of Evesham was, if the destroyer, yet the 
disciple, of the uncle and teacher whom he overthrew. 
Wherever, in the Old World or the New, we see a free 
assembly, a constitutional executive, wherever we see 
Lords and Commons, Senate and Representatives, 
wherever we see a chief ruler, be he King, President, 
or Governor, bound by the law and ruling according 
to the law, there we see the work of the men of 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR SECOND HOME. 1 67 

England in the thirteenth century; there, above all, 
we see the work of the leaders of the men of England 
in the thirteenth century. That work was the joint 
work of the victor of Lewes and his prisoner, of the 
victor of Evesham and his victim. What Earl Simon 
began and sealed with the martyr's death, King Edward 
brought to its full growth in the life which he lived for 
England and her people. 

The Norman kings then practically ruled as despots, 
but as despots under whom the old forms of freedom still 
lived on, to grow up once more into a fuller life when 
the nation, strengthened and cleansed in the furnace, 
came forth ready for the strife for freedom in the thir- 
teenth century. By one of those cycles of history in 
which one age seems so strangely to reproduce another, 
a second time came when English kings were practically 
despots, but when the forms of freedom in their second 
shape still lived on. Under the kings of the house of 
York, still more under the kings of the house of Tudor, 
the royal power became again as great and terrible as it 
had been under the Conqueror himself. As we once 
indirectly owed our freedom to the mighty strength, to 
the deep wisdom, of William the Norman, so we indi- 
rectly owed it again, partly to the caprice, partly to the 
inborn English feeling, of Henry the Eighth. He too 
would be a despot, but he too would be a despot under 
the forms of freedom ; he loved to do his worst crimes 
with every outward sanction of law. Once more then 
the forms lived on, again to be clothed with substance 
in better times. What the struggle of the thirteenth 
century was to the despotism of the eleventh and 



1 68 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE PIOMES. 

twelfth, the struggle of the seventeenth century was to 
the despotism of the sixteenth. But, while the despot- 
ism of the sixteenth century ran its course, when it 
sank into the weaker, the less English, despotism of 
the seventeenth, a new world was brought within 
sight of the old. The range of our story widens ; the 
bounds of the civilized world itself widen ; the law 
and freedom of England win new realms for them- 
selves in the third home of the English folk. The 
strife of the thirteenth century was waged by the men 
and on the soil of the second England only. In 
the struggle of the seventeenth century the third Eng- 
land had its share also; that struggle indeed had no 
small share in bringing that third England into being. 
This evening we have passed with a swift step over 
those ages of our history in which the field of action 
of the English people gathered wholly round their 
home in , Britain. We will wind up with a glance at 
its twofold fortunes since its field of action, without 
forsaking the Old World, has been extended to the 
New. 



v 



LECTURE VI. 

STije jSccontr Uogage anti tije Eijtrtr J^otne, 

I am now fast nearing the end of my course. I have 
reached the last evening of my appearance among you, 
and in our historic survey we have reached our last "stage. 
The third home of the English people is in sight, and 
one part of the English people is making ready for its 
second voyage. Metaphor apart, I have now to enter 
on the hardest part of my task, to say to you whatever 
I may venture directly to say to you about your own 
land and yourselves who dwell in it. On that head I 
must, even more than in earlier parts of my subject, 
stick close to those aspects of the land and people 
among whom I now find myself which specially con- 
cern me, with those which help to connect that land 
and its people with the other branches of the English 
folk and the lands in which they dwell. And let me 
tell you at the beginning that, in the time which I 
have as yet spent in the third England, it is the likeness, 
not the unlikeness, to the second England which strikes 
me. I know not how it might be with one who had 
come straight from Britain to America, and who had 
seen nothing of the mainland of Europe. Such an one 
might perhaps be most struck by points of difference 
between the third England and the second. But as I 
happen to have seen a good deal of other European lands, 

169 



170 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

as I am therefore used to things far more unlike my own 
land, what mainly strikes me is how little the English 
people have changed by making their second voyage. 
I have often to go through a distinct process of thought 
to remind myself that I am in New England, and not in 
Middle England still. I know not how it might be if I 
had entered your Union by the other end, and had seen 
its western, its newer portions, first. I do not doubt that 
I should there find points of difference from my own 
England which I do not find here in these eastern 
states. But assuredly, in all that I have seen, my 
main feeling is one of wonder how little the younger 
England differs from the elder. But in truth, if I 
thoroughly grasp my own leading doctrine, I ought 
not to wonder. Why should it differ ? Differ of 
course it must in smaller points which depend on cli- 
mate and local circumstances. But such differences are 
found in different parts of Britain, of England itself: 
such differences are found in different parts of the United 
States. I do not notice more difference, in some points 
I notice less difference, than if I go into Northern Eng- 
land, especially into that part of Northern England to 
which an innovation of a few centuries past insists on 
extending the name of Scotland. In public forms and 
notices I mark the differences which necessarily follow on 
the differences in your central and local government ; but 
they seem to me to be hardly so great as those which 
strike me if I pass from the kingdom of England into 
the kingdom of Scotland. I hear some words used in 
ways which are new to me ; I hear no words that are 
absolutely new ; I hear no words so sounded that I can- 
not catch their meaning. It has not as yet happened to 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 171 

me in this land, as it once happened to me in the bishop- 
ric of Durham, to listen — for philological purposes only 
— to a conversation of some sentences between the 
natives, and to carry off only a single word. That word 
in my Durham case was one that did not tell me much 
of the subject of discourse. It was the very short word 
" bob," which might mean either a man or a coin or a 
blow dealt with the hand, or which, in a dialect a little 
further north, might even be a verb, according to the 
good practical counsel, "If it's nae weel bobbit, we'll 
bob it again." I am of course struck with the neces- 
sary lack of antiquities in the way of buildings ; not so 
much with the lack of work of earlier times, for which of 
course I did not look, but at the rarity of what I might 
have expected to find, characteristic work of the seven- 
teenth century. But I see that the reason is to be found 
in the habit, natural in a newly-settled land, of chiefly 
building in wood. And of course there are large parts 
of elder countries also in which the same lack strikes us. 
Ancient buildings do not form the main feature of Lon- 
don or Paris ; they are as unknown at Liverpool as they 
are at New York. And here too the standard of anti- 
quity fluctuates. What passes for old in England passes 
for modern in Italy or Greece. So we may set up a 
standard of comparative antiquity even here in America. 
You have things here as distinctly ancient as anything 
in Europe, if by ancient we mean belonging to a state 
of things which has passed away, or at all events to a 
state of things which could not now begin afresh. If 
the student of early institutions goes to Switzerland 
and Northern Germany, he comes to New England 
also. To say nothing of smaller local institutions, the 



172 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

state of Rhode Island, the state of Delaware, are things 
as distinctly old as the cantons of Uri and Unterwalden. 
That is to say, nothing of the kind could come into being 
for the first time now. Even in the matter of buildings, 
my mind has not often been more puzzled in the old 
world than it has been over that mysterious tower, mill, 
whatever it is, which stands on the green at Newport. 
And among the elder houses of that city of timber, I 
have lighted on a few which might have stood very well 
in my native Staffordshire. One point however I must 
mention, in which it would seem that America does very 
distinctly differ, not only from Britain, but from Europe 
as a whole. I had heard of " the almighty dollar ;" I am 
amazed at its lack of might. I find that it has no more 
strength than coins so much smaller as a shilling, a 
mark, a franc, have in the old world. Yet even on this 
head I had gone a kind of apprenticeship in certain 
familiarity with an intermediate coin, the Austrian florin. 
I know not whether it is good political economy or not, 
but in all these lands prices seem to have a remarkable 
way of adapting themselves to the coinage. If in the next 
or any meeting of Congress, any of your political parties 
should propose an imitation of Europe on one small 
point, the substitution of the franc for the dollar, at all 
events when visitors have to pay, that political party 
should earn, not my vote —for I am not quite enough 
at home among you to have one — but my best thanks 
and good wishes. 

To turn to more serious matters, in my last lecture 
we reached, by a somewhat capricious and desultory 
road, the point at which part of the English people took 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 73 

their second voyage. I pointed out at an earlier stacre 
that the main difference between that second voyage and 
the first was this ; the first voyage was made when all that 
was in being was the germs of English national life, while, 
when the second voyage was made, English national life had 
long reached its full growth. Herein, I said, lay the cause 
of the obvious fact that the first separation wrought so 
much wider a gap between the first and second England 
than the second separation made between the second 
and the third. The English of the seventeenth centuiy 
were not only the same people as ourselves in the sense 
in which the English of the fifth century were the same 
people. They were, in all essential respects, the same 
kind of people that we are now. Our language was 
thoroughly formed ; the English of the seventeenth 
century simply sounds a little old-fashioned; everybody 
can understand it ; while the English of the fifth cen- 
tury, like any equally distant form of any other lan- 
guage, has to be learned like another tongue. If I were 
to say that our political constitution was the same, some 
one would tell me first, that the present American and the 
present English constitution are quite different from one 
another, and then that both are quite different from the 
English constitution in the seventeenth century. Both 
these sayings are, in one sense, very obvious truths, and 
yet there is a sense in which they in no way contradict 
the position — the paradox, if you will — at which I just 
hinted. I venture to say that the English and American 
constitutions are, in a sense, the same. To this perhaps 
specially strange paradox I will presently come back ; 
but to say that the English constitution was the same in 
the seventeenth and in the nineteenth is hardly a paradox. 
12 



174 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

The working is very different ; but the machine is essen- 
tially the same. A general view of the English constitution 
in its later form might run thus : Its great leading prin- 
ciples were established by Earl Simon and King Edward 
the First. It had been wrought into its present shape by 
the beginning of the fourteenth century. As far as the 
written law goes, the main features of the constitution 
and law of England were the same then that they are 
now. Then came the Yorkist, Tudor, and Stewart times, 
times of progress in many ways, but in a strictly consti- 
tutional view, times of backsliding. The law was trod- 
den under foot ; kings habitually broke the law accord- 
ing to which they were sworn to govern. The two 
struggles of the seventeenth century, the great revolt 
against Charles the First and the milder revolt against 
James the Second, really brought back the state of things 
which was at the beginning of the fourteenth century; 
William the Third holds, in a wonderful way, the 
same position as Henry the Fourth. Since that time the 
work of progress in England has consisted, not in formal 
changes in the constitution, but in bringing its practical 
working in harmony with the changing needs of the 
time. As far as the written law goes, as far as anything 
goes that a court of law can take notice of, the relations 
among the powers of the state in England have hardly 
changed at all since the days of William the Third, or 
even since the days of Henry the Fourth. The change 
which has taken place since those days is that each 
power in the state now acts, not only according to the 
written law, but according to certain constitutional rules 
which are not written in any law-book, but which are 
in practice perfectly understood, and which amount to a 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 75 

practical acknowledgement of the supremacy of the House 
of Commons, and thereby of the people whom that house 
represents. It would be thoroughly unfair to blame 
Charles the First or James the Second for not ruling 
according to conventional understandings which have 
been established since their time. It is thoroughly fair 
to blame them for trampling under foot the written law 
which had been established long before their time, and 
which some earlier kings had at least tried to carry out. 
It is equally unfair to attempt to defend Charles the 
First on the ground that most, perhaps all, of his 
breaches of law can be matched by some act cf some 
earlier reign. There is a wide difference between occa- 
sional breaches of law done by a king in irregular times 
when breaches of law are common on the part of every- 
body, and systematic breaches of law done in settled times 
by a king who is strong enough to make everybody 
else keep the law, but who keeps for himself the privilege 
of breaking it. The revolution of 1688 brought things 
back to the point which was established by the revolu- 
tion of 1 399. The king henceforth obeys the law ; but, 
within the limits of the powers which the law gives 
him, he can still act according to his personal will. 
The work of the time which has passed since the revolu- 
tion of 1688 has been to substitute for the personal will 
of the king the indirectly expressed will of the people. 

It was while the law and constitution of England were 
at this special point that most of the American colonies, 
those above all in this part of the continent, were found- 
ed. As Englishmen settling in a new land, the colonists 
brought with them the law of England; but they naturally 
brought it with them only in such modified shapes as were 



176 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

made necessary by settlement in a new land. Will it jar on 
any theory of progress if I say that many of the changes 
which settlement in a new land made needful were 
changes backward ? I certainly find that the best way 
of going forward very often is to go backward. Many 
of the very best reforms in English law have been mere 
fallings back on the simpler principles of earlier times ; 
and this fact is all the more valuable because I am sure 
that, in some cases at least, the authors of those reforms 
did not know that they were falling back on the princi- 
ples of earlier times. The seventeenth century was in- 
deed a time in which men consciously fell back on the 
principles of earlier times. Through all English history 
the cry has never been for new laws, but for the firmer 
establishment, the stricter observance, of the old laws. 
The patriots of the seventeenth century went back for 
their precedents to the fifteenth. But those among them 
who founded the American colonies often went back 
further still, and often went back unconsciously. The 
conditions of the earliest times had largely come back 
again. The settlers of the seventeenth century differed 
from the settlers of the fifth in being Christian and civ- 
ilized men, bringing with them all that man learned in 
the space of twelve hundred years. But they were like 
the settlers of the fifth century in this, that they were 
settlers in a new land, settling in small bodies, founding 
a great number of small and separate settlements. This 
is quite another process from conquest on a large scale, 
such conquests, for instance, as the Spaniards made in 
other parts of the American continent. I must hold 
that the advance of your great Union has been all the 
wider, all the surer, because the beginnings were small, 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 77 

because advance was for a long time slow. The small 
beginnings, the slow advance, is an essential part of 
the history, and it was an element which, more than 
any other, helped toward the establishment and main- 
tenance of free institutions. Let us suppose that a king 
of England, clothed with great powers by law, and tak- 
ing to himself great further powers in the teeth of the 
law, had won the same kind of dominion in this part of 
America as the Kings of Spain won in other parts. In 
one sense England would have been more directly repro- 
duced on American soil than it was. That is to say, 
there might have been as near a reproduction as change 
of place allowed of the state of England as it then stood, 
with the abuses of the royal power as part of that 
state. The course which events really took allowed of 
the reproduction of England in a much truer and 
healthier shape. It was because the land was not con- 
quered by kings, but was settled by small companies 
of men, many of whom actually went to be out of the 
king's way, that more truly English institutions could 
grow up. It was not the existing England that was 
reproduced, but a new England that was founded. But 
the new England that was founded was in a certain 
sense an old England. The conditions of earlier 
times had largely come back, and the settlers, while 
bringing English feelings and English laws with them, 
worked those laws and feelings in many respects into 
institutions of an earlier type than those which they 
left behind in the mother-country. The circumstances 
of the settlements allowed each little new-born home of 
Englishmen to grow up for itself after its own fashion. 
• The same circumstances shut out any great interference 



i;8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

on the part of the government at home. The great 
historic interest of these settlements, above all of the 
New England settlements, lies in the fact that they were 
driven, even if they had not wished, to give their insti- 
tutions a more primitive character than the existing in- 
stitutions of England; that is, as I should venture to 
put it, to advance by going back. All local institutions 
were necessarily of a simpler kind than they were in the 
elder country. That is to say, the settlers were driven 
to cast off many of the improvements or corruptions, 
as we may choose to call them, which had overshadowed 
the elder institutions of the mother-country, and largely 
to fall back on the primitive form- of those institutions. 
In some settlements the primitive democracy, the direct 
share of every citizen in the political assembly of his 
people, which had died out or had been utterly over- 
shadowed everywhere in Europe save in a few of the 
Swiss cantons, appeared again on American soil in all 
its fulness. 

Thus in the seventeenth century, exactly as in the 
fifth and sixth, English settlement took the form of a 
great number of small, distinct, to a large extent prac- 
tically independent, settlements. Herein lay the root 
of the matter ; the third England was not made, but 
grew. The history of the settlements, the migrations, 
the quarrels, the shiftings, the unions, the divisions, is 
somewhat hard to carry in the head. But their gen- 
eral character and their place in the history of the 
world is plain enough. That character, that place, 
assuredly lies among ancient events. It is as essen- 
tially an old piece of history as anything in old 
Greece or in mediaeval Switzerland. It is the small- 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 79 

ness of scale which is the beauty of the whole thing. 
It is so, not only because it really heightens the history 
of the story; it is so in a more practical way also. 
You will say that I am again at my paradoxes if I say 
that the present greatness of your Confederation is 
mainly owing to the littleness of its beginnings. A 
stage may come when it is the right thing to admit a 
state like Texas ; but I am much more sure that Rhode 
Island is the right kind of thing to begin with. I look 
at the map of Rhode Island with admiration mingled 
with a certain measure of regret. I regret that another 
Rhode Island cannot come into being now. I see no 
room for it either in Europe or in America ; I am not 
clear that there is room for it even in Australia. I am 
half afraid that we have got too civilized for the growth 
of another Rhode Island. I am not sure that a little 
privacy, a little isolation, is not needed for such a 
growth ; it might not be healthy for it to have the 
world staring at it through the spectacles of the daily 
newspaper and the electric telegraph. In these little 
new-made settlements there was a strength and fresh- 
ness of political life which can hardly be in states of a 
larger scale. They gave to the body of which they 
were one chief element, and certainly the most whole- 
some element, a certain keenness, a certain variety, of 
political experience which a greater physical scale 
would have gone far to blunt and to dim. A number 
of these small communities, separate from one another, 
connected with the mother-country by a very lax tie, 
not without local jealousies and rivalries, were the best 
conceivable materials out of which to construct a fed- 
eral system. Newer and larger States, admitted into a 



ISO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

Federal Union already formed, can never have the same 
political schooling. They are, as it were, born grown- 
up; they have not had the wholesome discipline of such 
a childhood as that of New England. It is no fault of 
theirs ; like the Frenchman in my little story, they can't 
help it. They had not the good luck to be born at the 
same lucky moment and under the same lucky sur- 
roundings as the New England States. I have some- 
times wished that I could find myself no older than I 
was thirty or forty years back, keeping all that I have 
learned in those thirty or forty years. Something like 
this singular good luck did really happen to Massachu- 
setts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and their fellows. 
Armed and strengthened with all the experience and 
civilization of the seventeenth century, they were driven 
to start afresh from nearly the same conditions as the 
men of the fifth and sixth centuries. 

The founders of the third England thus brought with 
them the institutions of the second England, but modified 
by the circumstances of the settlement in a manner which 
went some way to recall the primitive institutions of the 
first England. And I may say this for evil as well as for 
good. I believe that the great mass of mankind have not 
the faintest notion that slavery was an ancient English 
institution. Of course I do not mean that it was in any 
way specially English. It was simply common to the 
English with all other nations who have the chance to 
get slaves and who have not yet found out that slavery 
is either wrong or unprofitable. In an r early stage of 
society slavery is the doom of the prisoner of war ; it is 
often the legal doom of the criminal. In both cases it 
often passes as a merciful substitute for death. The chil- 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. l8l 

dren of the slave are slaves; a slave-class is thus formed; 
in England it was formed, partly out of British captives 
and their descendants, partly out of English criminals and 
their descendants. The very name of slave points to the 
main origin of the state of slavery. It is no Latin word ; 
it is no Teutonic word. It is the name of the great race 
of the Slaves, a name which in its own tongue means, per- 
haps glorious, perhaps speaking to be understood, but which, 
both in Eastern and in Western Europe, became the com- 
mon name for bondmen, when the wars of both Eastern and 
Western Emperors had filled all lands with bondsmen of 
Slavonic blood. So in England, where we had no chance 
of Slavonic captives, the name which we gave to our 
British neighbours served the same purpose. We first 
called them Welsh or strangers ; we then used the Welsh 
name to mean bondmen. In England both slavery in 
the strict sense, and villainage, that middle state between 
mere slavery and full freedom, died out step by step 
without ever being abolished by law. Step by step the 
slaves became villains, and the villains became freemen. 
They could easily do so ; the descendant either of the 
English criminal or of the Welsh captive, when he was 
once set free, differed in nothing from his master. Pure 
slavery died out so early in England that men forgot that 
such a thing had ever been. Villainage was remembered 
as a thing of the past, but the state of the slave passed 
out of memory. When slavery appeared again in a 
new form, when English colonists brought their slaves 
of another race and colour to the mother-country, the 
question was gradually stirred, and English judges, with 
more regard to abstract right than to the past history of 
England, declared that in England slavery could not be, 



1 82 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

and that the first breath of English air set the slave 
free. I would have you notice three things : First, 
there was an early time when there was white slavery in 
England, just as there was in old Greece, or old Italy, or 
any other part of the world. Secondly, there was a 
much later time when there was black slavery in Eng- 
land, though only on a small scale, as when it was fash- 
ionable for fine ladies to be waited on by negro boys. 
Thirdly, when slavery appeared again in the colonies, it 
appeared again in its oldest shape. Both Cromwell and 
James the Second sent criminals, rebels, even Scottish 
prisoners of war, to be slaves, both in the American 
mainland and in the West India islands. I am con- 
cerned with this matter only to show how, both for 
good and for evil, the force of circumstances drove the 
colonists to reproduce in many things the conditions of 
far earlier times. The thing that gives the fact its his- 
toric value is that this was done altogether unconsciously. 
The men who set up free townships and the men who 
took to themselves bondmen were assuredly not think- 
ing that the followers of Hengest and Cerdic had done 
the like. 

But the institutions which thus grew up in the Ameri- 
can colonies, and which grew into their most perfect 
shape in the New England colonies, were, after all, insti- 
tutions essentially local. Even, those which reached what 
we may call the greatest physical size, the legislatures 
of the greater colonies, were still, in the strictest sense, 
provincial. They were not the institutions of a great 
nation. They could not be so as long as local freedom, 
though carried perhaps to the furthest point that a merely 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 83 

local freedom could be, was still merely local. There 
could be no national institutions till a nation was formed, 
and a nation could not be formed as long as any trace 
remained of dependence on a power beyond the Ocean. 
The colonies, as long as they remained provinces, might 
be practically free in all that concerned their own internal 
affairs ; in the general affairs of the whole English people 
they had no voice. Matters of peace and war were 
settled for them by a power over which they had not 
even an indirect control. In the war of a hundred and 
twenty years back, the war in which some of your revo- 
lutionary heroes first tried their 'prentice hands, the 
colonial, provincial, continental, troops served with a 
good will. There was every reason why they should 
serve with a good will. But, willing or unwilling, they 
had no share in settling such matters. Whether Vir- 
ginia and Louisiana should be at war or at peace 
depended, not on Virginia and Louisiana, not on any 
greater wholes of which Virginia and Louisiana formed 
parts, but on two kings far away in Europe. At last the 
mother-country went a step too far in reminding her dis- 
tant provinces that they were provinces. Englishmen on 
this side of Ocean had no more mind than Englishmen 
on the other side to be taxed by an assembly in which 
they were not represented. The political tie was snapped ; 
thirteen settlements of Englishmen became free and 
independent states, no longer provinces of the British 
crown, but colonies .of the English people more truly 
than ever. 

No sane person in Great Britain now approves of the 
attempt to tax the colonies. No sane person does other- 
wise than rejoice that the colonies became free and inde- 



1 84 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

pendent. But let us, in common fairness, say a word for 
King George. In all that he did he was backed by the 
great mass of the British nation. And let us even say a 
word for the British nation also. Had the King and the 
nation been really wise, they would have let the colonies 
go without striking a blow. But then no king and no 
nation ever was really wise after that fashion. King 
George and the British nation were simply not wiser than 
other people. I believe that you may turn the pages of 
history from the earliest to the latest times, without finding 
a time when any king or any commonwealth, freely and will- 
ingly, without compulsion or equivalent, gave up power 
or dominion, or even mere extent of territory on the map, 
when there was no real power or dominion. Remember 
that, seventeen years after the acknowledgement of Amer- 
ican independence, King George still called himself King 
of France. Remember that, when the title was given up, 
some people thought it unwise to give it up. Remember 
that some people in our own day regretted the separation 
between the crowns of Great Britain and Hannover. If 
they lived to see the year 1866, perhaps they grew 
wiser. 

In the third England, as in the second, strictly national 
union came from the joining together of many smaller 
local bodies. And the work of union was in both cases 
largely advanced by a struggle with a common enemy. 
But the different circumstances of the two cases caused 
the process of union to take two quite different forms in 
Britain and in America. In Britain, beyond the occa- 
sional and precarious supremacy of the Bretwaldas, there 
was no political tie of any kind among the many Teu- 
tonic states. Up to the conversion Englishmen had no 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 85 

acknowledged and abiding head in any shape ; after the 
conversion they had a head ; but he did not appear in the 
shape of a civil or political ruler ; the head of Angle-kin 
was the first bishop in the land. But in America the 
several colonies were, after all, members of a greater 
whole ; they had -a common tie in their allegiance to 
the King of Great Britain. Again, in Britain the com- 
mon enemy was a foreign invader ; in the first stages of 
the strife, he was a heathen invader. In America the 
common enemy was no other than the common head, 
the King of Great Britain himself. In Britain union 
took the form of annexation of the several states by 
one greater state. All the Teutonic states in Britain be- 
came, first dependencies of the West-Saxon king, then 
integral parts of his kingdom. The King of the West- 
Saxons grew into the King of the English. We may 
believe that the early stages of this process were not 
much liked by the kingdoms which thus lost their inde- 
pendent being. But in the later stages, when the com- 
ing of the Dane had left the West-Saxon king the only 
English and Christian King in the land, the men of 
other parts of England welcomed his rule, as that of a 
deliverer from the heathen yoke. Thus the effect of the 
struggle with a foreign enemy was the absorption of sev- 
eral separate powers into one. But when the common 
enemy was the prince whose common headship was the 
only political tie among the separate settlements, things 
naturally took another course. That course did not lead 
to the same complete union among the English settle- 
ments in America which had come to pass ages before 
among the English settlements in Britain. Absorption 
of the lesser colonies by one larger one could not hap- 



1 86 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

pen while all alike admitted the supremacy of a common 
king. It could not happen in the face of the common dan- 
ger, when the common king had changed into the com- 
mon enemy to be withstood. The struggle showed the 
need of union ; but for the moment — at least in idea — it 
brought perfect disunion. When the one tie was snapped, 
there was no other ready made. A new tie had to be 
created ; among states which felt the need of union, but 
which had no mind to give up local independence, that tie 
naturally took a federal shape. First came the laxer union, 
which needed to declare that it was to be perpetual. 
Then came the more perfect union, which needed not to 
declare itself perpetual, seeing perpetuity was implied 
in its increased perfection. And the federal union neces- 
sarily took a republican form. That a federal monarchy 
is not impossible has been since proved by the experience 
of Germany. But a federal monarchy could hardly arise, 
except where the particular states were used to mon- 
archic government. A federal Emperor is a perfectly 
natural head for a company of kings and grand dukes. 
A federal king would have been a very unnatural head 
for a company of states which, even when nominally 
subject, had been practically commonwealths. The cir- 
cumstances of the tenth century led the English king- 
doms in Britain, naturally and necessarily, to coalesce 
in the shape of a consolidated kingdom. The circum- 
stances of the eighteenth century led the English com- 
monwealths in America, as naturally and necessarily, to 
coalesce in the shape of a federal commonwealth. 

Will it now be set down as yet another paradox, if I 
say that the constitution of the federal commonwealth 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 87 

is really not a new things but only a modification of the 
constitution of the consolidated kingdom ? The differ- 
ences are many, as could not fail to be when the change 
of circumstances was so great; but I see far more to 
wonder at in the amount of likeness than in the amount 
of unlikeness. It would have been nothing strange, if 
the founders of the American constitution had made it 
as unlike as they possibly could to the constitution of 
Great Britain. Instead of so doing, they made it as like 
to the elder model as the circumstances of the two cases 
allowed. Read what the founders of the constitution say 
for themselves in the Federalist. Never were men fur- 
ther removed from the character of reckless innovators 
than Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. I suspect that in their 
hearts they were a trifle more conservative than they 
thought it wise to proclaim to the world. Anyhow 
they preserved the main outlines of the old model. 
The three great elements of Teutonic polity, the ruling- 
chief, the council of elders, and the popular assembly, are 
there in the newer work, no less than in the older. The 
vulgar mind thinks that the difference must be something 
amazingly great, because the ruling chief is a hereditary 
king in the one land and an elective president in the 
other. The student of constitutional history looks on 
this as a small difference compared with that which 
parts off both king and president from a state of things 
where there is no ruling chief at all. The Swiss federal 
constitution, which in many points so closely follows 
the American model, has no personal head at all. The 
powers of the executive, much smaller in their range 
than those of either king or president, are vested in a 
council of seven, of whom the so-called President of 



1 88 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

the Confederation is simply chairman. Your Senate, 
your " other house," is something more than " another 
house." It is not merely traditional, like the British 
House of Lords, nor merely ornamental, like the French 
Senate. It is an essential part of the federal system, as 
much needed to embody the rights of the several free 
and independent States as the House of Representa- 
tives is needed to embody the national being of the uni- 
ted people. And yet I doubt whether the idea of the 
Senate would have come into the head of any man who 
was not familiar with the British House of Lords. Remem- 
ber that national assemblies composed of two houses were 
not so common then throughout the world as the com- 
bined example of Britain and America has made them 
since. In fact, the American examples, both in the fed- 
eral constitution and in the constitutions of particular 
states, must have been among the first in which the 
system of two houses was deliberately adopted. I say 
deliberately, because it should always be borne in mind 
that the system of two Houses of Parliament came about 
in England, like most other things, by the force of cir- 
cumstances. There was no moment in English history 
when either the people of England or any king of Eng- 
land said, We will have two Houses of Parliament rather 
than one or three. The existing constitution of Lords 
and Commons settled itself, after showing tendencies 
quite unlike the shape which it took in the end. 
But it is to be supposed that the many cases in 
which the system of two houses has been adopted 
in America, not only in the constitutions of States, 
but in the local constitutions of cities, show a distinct 
conviction that two houses do the work better than 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 89 

either one or three. But bear in mind that, both 
in the State and in the city, it is simply a question 
in what way the work will be best done. If you 
should ever think that either one house or three houses 
would manage your affairs better than two houses, there 
is no reason why you should not change your two 
houses for one or three. This is true of the city ; it is 
true of the State ; but it is not true of the Union. There 
it is of the essence of the federal system that the whole 
nation as such and the States as such should both be 
represented. And this can be done only by having two 
Houses. One house or three would not do. 

The main point of unlikeness between the English 
and the American constitutions may be said, if I may 
be allowed another journey into the regions of paradox, 
to consist in this, that there is a constitution in America 
and that there is no constitution in England. I mean 
that in America there is a written document called the 
Federal Constitution, which lays down the exact powers 
of the different federal authorities, a document which 
cannot be altered by ordinary legislation, but only in a 
special way laid down in the constitution itself. In Eng- 
land there is no constitution in this sense ; there is no 
one document placed beyond ordinary legislation ; there 
is nothing which King, Lords and Commons, acting to- 
gether, cannot change at any moment, in the form of an 
ordinary act of parliament. What we commonly call the 
British constitution is simply a system of silent under- 
standings as to the way in which the powers which the 
law gives j- th e several authorities of the state are to 
be exercised. In England therefore conduct may be 
highly unconstitutional which is in no way illegal. It 

13 



190 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

may be deserving of parliamentary censure, while it 
would be no ground for proceedings in any court of 
law. In America conduct cannot be unconstitutional 
without being illegal. This, I apprehend, is true in a 
strict sense, though I am aware that something like a 
system of unwritten understandings, answering to our 
unwritten constitution, has grown up round about your 
great written document. Now this main distinction, that 
the constitution of the one country is written and that 
of the other is unwritten follows necessarily from the 
circumstances of each. The English constitution had 
grown up, bit by bit, out of the primitive germs of our 
political institutions ; it was never even revised in any 
formal way. The only time when anything like a writ- 
ten constitution was set up in England was under the 
Protectorate. But the acts of the Protectorate were 
held to be null alike by the partisans of the King and 
by the partisans of the Parliament. At the Restoration 
of Charles the Second the old constitution revived of 
itself, without any formal re-enactment. A new nation, 
such as the English settlements in America became by 
the fact of independence, found itself in a different posi- 
tion. Even had there been only one state, and not 
thirteen, it would probably have been found convenient 
to define the range of each of the powers of the com- 
monwealth in a written document. But when there 
were thirteen states to be joined together in a fed- 
eral union, the written document was not only conve- 
nient, but necessary. A federal constitution is of the 
nature of a treaty. It is an agreement by which certain 
political communities, in themselves independent and 
sovereign, agree to surrender certain of the attributes 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 191 

of independence and sovereignty to a central authority, 
while others of these attributes they keep in their own 
hands. A written document is absolutely necessary as 
an authoritative record to declare which powers are 
ceded to the Union and which are kept in the hands 
of the States. In a federal state then a written constitu- 
tion is matter of necessity ; in a state of any other form, 
whether monarchy or commonwealth, it is a mere mat- 
ter of circumstances and convenience in each particular 
case. Your several States have found it convenient to 
draw up written constitutions ; but it should be remem- 
bered that Rhode Island lived on for many years after 
the Declaration of Independence with no constitution 
beyond its original charter. 

From the fact that the United States have a written 
constitution some points of difference between them 
and England have directly followed. I will mention 
two only. One is the great powers with which your 
Supreme Federal Court is clothed. It is, I believe, 
the only national tribunal in the world which can sit 
in judgement on a national law, and can declare an 
act of all the three powers of the Union to be null 
and void. No such power does or can exist in 
England. Any one of the three powers of the state, 
King, Lords, or Commons, acting alone, may act il- 
legally; the three acting together cannot act illegally. 
An act of parliament is final ; it may be repealed 
by the power which enacted it; it cannot be ques- 
tioned by any other power. For in England there is 
no written constitution; the powers of Parliament, of 
King, Lords, and Commons, acting together, are liter- 
ally boundless. But in your Union, it is not only pos- 



192 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

sible that President, Senate, or House of Represent- 
atives, acting alone, may act illegally ; the three acting 
together may act illegally. For their powers are not 
boundless ; they have no powers but such as the terms 
of the constitution, that is, the original treaty between 
the States, have given them. Congress may pass, the 
President may assent to, a measure which contradicts 
the terms of the constitution. If they so act, they act 
illegally, and the Supreme Court can declare such an act 
to be null and void. This difference flows directly from 
the difference between a written and an unwritten con- 
stitution. It does not follow that every state which has 
a written constitution need vest in its highest court such 
powers as are vested in yours, though it certainly seems 
to me that, in a federal constitution, such a power is 
highly expedient. My point is simply that such a 
power can exist where there is a written constitution : 
where there is no written constitution, it cannot. 

The other point of difference which follows from the 
presence or absence of a written constitution is perhaps 
more obvious at first sight. This is the position of the 
chief magistrate of the Union. The President replaces 
the King, but his position really comes nearer to that 
of the Prime Minister. But he differs a good deal from 
either the one or the other. The powers of the Presi- 
dent, the mode of his election, the duration of his office, 
are all laid down in your federal constitution. The posi- 
tion of the King of Great Britain and Ireland is equally 
laid down by law. He comes to the crown by heredi- 
tary succession, not by virtue of any divine right, but 
by virtue of a certain act of parliament. As King, he 
holds certain powers denned by law. But here steps 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 93 

in the unwritten constitution. That great traditional 
authority decrees that, of the powers which the Kino- 
holds by law, some shall never be exercised at all, 
while the others shall be exercised only by the advice 
of a person called the Prime Minister, a member of one 
or the other house of Parliament, tacitly approved by 
the House of Commons. In short the kingly power 
can be exercised only by the advice of the leader of 
that party which has the majority in the House of 
Commons. He keeps office as long as the House of 
Commons approves of his policy ; if the House of Com- 
mons ceases to approve of his policy, he finds it neces- 
sary to resign. He may indeed, under some circum- 
stances, dissolve Parliament; but if the new House of 
Commons disapproves of his policy, then he must resign. 
Now there never is any doubt in England who is Prime 
Minister, any more than there is any doubt here who is 
President. Mr. Gladstone is as certainly Prime Minister 
of the United Kingdom as Mr. Arthur is President of 
the United States. But while Mr. Arthur holds a posi- 
tion which is carefully defined by the written constit - 
tion, Mr. Gladstone holds, as Prime Minister, a position 
which the written law of England knows nothing abou':. 
The law knows him as a British subject, as a member of 
the House of Commons, as a member of the Queen's 
Privy Council. All these things Sir Stafford Northcote 
is equally. The law assumes that every act of the Queen 
is done by the advice of some Privy Councillor, who 
takes the responsibility of the act on himself. But, as 
far as the law knows, Sir Stafford Northcote is as likely 
to be the adviser of any act of the Queen as Mr. Glad- 
stone. But the law further knows Mr. Gladstone as one 



194 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

of certain Commissioners named by the Queen to dis- 
charge the office of Lord High Treasurer, an office 
which for a long time back has never been held by a 
single person. In that commission his name stands first; 
he is First Lord of the Treasury. And to the First 
Lord of the Treasury — an officer inferior in rank to 
many of his colleagues, who has no precedence beyond 
that of any other privy councillor — that system of tacit 
understandings which is all that we mean in England by 
the word " constitution " entrusts the practical exercise 
of most of those powers of the crown which the same 
system allows to be exercised at all. But the law knows 
nothing of him as Prime Minister ; it knows nothing of 
his colleagues as a " Government " or a " cabinet." The 
whole thing is conventional. No man is appointed to 
the office of Prime Minister, for no such office exists. 
And, as he comes into power without any formal elec- 
tion or nomination, so he can be deprived of power 
without any formal deposition. Let the House of 
Commons show that it no longer trusts him, and he 
and his colleagues must resign. 

Such is the working of an unwritten constitution, the 
working of a set of rules which are perfectly well under- 
stood, but which it would be impossible to set down in 
the shape of a written law. The position of your President 
under your written constitution differs greatly from that 
either of the King or of the Prime Minister. It is plain 
that the powers of the President are smaller than those 
of the King, but that he can exercise such powers as he 
has much more freely according to his own personal will. 
He is not bound to follow the advice of a minister who 
may not be of his own choosing, and whose advice may 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. I95 

be directly opposite to his personal wishes. On the other 
hand he acts more directly than the Prime Minister, who 
can do nothing except through the formal agency of the 
King whom he advises. But the main difference lies in 
this. Your President is chosen for a definite time : it is 
hard to see how a magistrate acting under a written con- 
stitution can be other than chosen or appointed for a 
definite time. But from the appointment for a definite 
time it follows that he cannot, under ordinary circum- 
stances, be got rid of before the end of that time — that 
he cannot, except by formal re-election, be continued 
beyond the end of that time. Let the policy of a Presi- 
dent be disapproved by both houses of Congress and 
by the nation at large, still, unless some definite crime 
can be legally proved against him, you cannot get rid 
of him till the end of four years. Let the policy of a 
President be approved by everybody, still you cannot 
keep him in office beyond four years, except by a formal 
re-election, except by making the chief of the state descend 
to the position of a candidate. With us the House of 
Commons can at any moment, by means which are 
indirect but thoroughly effectual, get rid of a minister 
whose policy it disapproves. And a minister whose 
policy the House of Commons continues to approve 
may be kept in office indefinitely, without any formal 
act on the part of anybody. Here, to my mind, lies 
the greatest point of difference between our unwritten 
and your written constitution, between our kingly and 
your republican constitution. And it is a point which, 
'd you ask my personal mind, is the one great advantage 
of our system over yours. Our way, it seems to me, 
is the more republican of the two ; we are less tied and 



196 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

bound to a single man. But the question comes, on the 
other side, whether this great advantage is or is not out- 
weighed by certain evils which are the natural outcome 
of our system, but which can have no place in yours. 
And, if I may speak from my very heart of hearts, I 
must say that yet another question lies behind : the 
question whether a more excellent way than either is 
not to be found in the position of the Executive in the 
present federal constitution of the Everlasting League. 

But mark that, if I speak of this or that, in the con- 
stitution of England, of America, or of Switzerland, as 
being better or worse than something in one of the other 
two constitutions, I am speaking as one who has got into 
the habit of studying a political constitution, as a kind 
of work of art, very much as I study a building. And, 
if I say that this or that church or castle or hall of 
government is better than another in this or that point, 
the last thing that I should wish would be that the one 
which I think not so good should be rebuilt or altered 
according to the pattern of that which I think better. 
As with buildings, so with constitutions, I should lose 
my subjects for study in both lines, if either all buildings 
or all constitutions were to be reconstructed after one 
model, even if that should be the most perfect of models. 
But, far more than this, I believe that each country is 
likely to do best by keeping to the institutions which 
its own special history has given it. Let it reform 
and develope within its own lines ; do not let it go 
and blindly copy what it finds elsewhere. We will, 
if you please, keep our King and our Minister; you 
shall keep your President; the Swiss shall keep their 
Federal Council : that each exists in a particular coun- 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 97 

try, that each has come through the course of events 
in that country, is the strongest argument in its favour 
as an institution of that particular country; it is to 
some extent an argument against transplanting it to 
any other country. It is natural that England should 
have kings, because it has had kings from the begin- 
ning. It is natural that America should not have a 
king, but that it should still have a personal chief, 
because England had a king, while a king on this 
side of the Ocean was neither desirable nor possible. 
The change from king to president was, what I con- 
ceive the founders of your constitution to have aimed 
at, as much change as was needful, and not more than 
was needful. It is equally natural that Switzerland 
should have neither king nor president nor personal 
chief in any shape. While Englishmen in Britain were 
used to an immediate king dwelling among them, while 
Englishmen in America were used to an immediate king 
not dwelling among them, the men of the Cantons had not 
for ages acknowledged any king at all, and had in earlier 
times known no king but Caesar. Each country may be 
fairly expected to prosper most under the system which 
has come naturally to it ; none of the three need seek to 
imitate the systems of the others ; each should strive to 
work its own system in the best way in which it can be 
worked. 

And now it is time that I should come to an end. I 
have as yet seen but little of your vast country, but I 
have seen enough to teach me its vastness. And it is 
indeed a thrilling thought for a man of the elder England 
to see what a home the newest home of his people is. 



I98 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

The heart swells, the pride of kinship rises, as he sees 
that it is his own folk which has done more than any 
other folk to replenish the earth and to subdue it. He 
is no Englishman at heart, he has no true feeling of the 
abiding tie of kindred, who deems that the glory and 
greatness of the child is other than part of the glory 
and greatness of the parent. Let him rise above purely 
local and political distinctions to the thought of the 
greater whole of which my native land and yours alike 
form parts, and he will even be able to track out the 
scenes of the war which parted them w T ith his feelings 
enlisted on the side of those who were geographically 
the furthest away from himself. I have gone up your 
Bunker Hill; I cannot honestly say that the spot kindled 
in me quite the enthusiasm which I had felt on the 
heights of Lewes and of Evesham — they are parts of 
my own story, and I am a geographical Britisher, after 
all — but certainly such enthusiasm as I did feel was 
on the side of those who threw up the redoubt, not 
on the side of those who attacked it. I can see one 
thing only which, if I had been present at your late 
gathering at York Town, would have gone at all to 
mar my thorough sympathy with the victorious side. I 
have so much of the John Bull in me that I could have 
wished that the French had been somewhere else. I 
could have wished that two armies of Englishmen could 
have fought out their quarrel without foreign help, 
as armies of Englishmen had done in so many earlier 
fields of civil war. And yet, after we had turned 
Hessian mercenaries loose upon you, we could hardly 
complain if you welcomed the alliance of France or of 
any other power. Anyhow, you won your independence, 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 1 99 

and we rejoice at it. Another English nation came 
into being. 

But perhaps some one may arise, even at this stage of 
our argument, to prove that you are not an English nation. 
Some one may stand up to argue that, however close the 
tie may have been ages back, it has been relaxed, per- 
haps it has been severed, since the American States have 
stood open to receive citizens from every quarter of the 
world. We may remember, by the way, that England 
has done so just as freely, though naturally the flow of 
strangers into the elder land has not been so fast as the 
flow of strangers into the new. Perhaps some may even 
urge this last fact as a proof that we have separated more 
than ever. I deny the inference. I wish to tread as 
lightly as possible on any matters which may stir up 
political questions ; but some of the facts out of which 
political questions have grown or seem likely to grow 
are scientific facts which we must look in the face. You 
receive all strangers, but do you assimilate all strangers 
with equal ease ? Do you not, as a matter of fact, 
find that some settlers can, with very little trouble, be 
changed into good Englishmen, good Americans, or 
whatever we choose to call them, while with others the 
work is, whether impossible or not, at any rate a great 
deal harder ? I assume that you are ready to welcome 
any of our Teutonic kinsfolk, High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, 
or Scandinavian. Truly they are not strangers at all ; 
they are members of the house who stayed behind, who 
have made the two voyages in one in a later age, instead 
of making the first in a very early age. Surely, when 
they have rubbed off their little local angles, they can 



200 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN ITS THREE HOMES. 

sit down at the common hearth and feel themselves quite 
at home. I do think that you find a settler from Utrecht, 
we will say, from Hamburg, from Christiania, something 
different from a settler from Pekin. I tremble as I speak 
of Aryan settlers who are not of the Teutonic race ; I 
have heard of other lecturers in this city who have 
suffered some persecution for not speaking with due 
respect of some who come under that head. I will 
therefore avoid dangerous ground. I will say only that, 
while all Teutons are very near to us, no European Aryan 
is very far from us ; there is enough of kindred, enough 
of likeness, left among all whose forefathers took part 
in the great migration to make assimilation among them 
easy, natural, and wholesome. No doubt it takes place 
faster with our nearer kinsfolk, but surely it takes place 
sooner or later with all who are kinsfolk at all. Surely 
I am right in saying that with all Dutchmen — the wider 
meaning of that good old word is still not forgotten 
in some of your States — assimilation is easy ; that with 
other Western Aryans it is at least possible ; with others 
beyond that pale I will not say what it is, for it might be 
dangerous ; I will leave you to draw the distinction 
instead of me. And what form does assimilation take 
where assimilation is possible ? Surely the settlers are 
assimilated and absorbed into the pre-existing body; 
they learn your tongue, they are admitted into your 
national being ; you do not learn their tongue or pass 
into their national being. The infusion may be greater 
in degree, but it is really only of the same kind, as the 
infusion which the elder England has during the last 
three hundred years received from other European lands. 
We have welcomed Flemings, Huguenots, Palatines, in 



THE SECOND VOYAGE AND THE THIRD HOME. 201 

no small measure, to say nothing of stray settlers from 
every European land. We do not look on our Bou- 
veries, Bentincks, and Romillies as other than English- 
men, any more than we should deny the name to a 
Percy or a Mowbray, if a real Percy or a real Mow- 
bray were to be found. Some may think that your 
grants of citizenship are a trifle too lavish ; I will not 
argue that point ; I will rather say how strong must the 
English heart be in you when you can grant your citi- 
zenship so lavishly and yet still abide an English nation. 
For an English nation you are ; I must part from you in 
once more reminding you that all that belongs to the 
older and lesser England in Britain belongs no less to 
the younger and greater England in the New World. 
Coming before you, I hailed you as English brethren ; 
parting from you, I part as from English brethren, 
sharers in the common history of the English folk. 
That history, from Arminius to Gladstone and Garfield, 
is a long one ; it is a stirring one. It has its dark sides 
and its gloomy periods, but, as a whole, it is one of 
which neither branch of the common stock needs to be 
ashamed. And assuredly, of that long and stirring his- 
tory, not the least memorable, not the least worthy, part 
has been wrought on the western side of Ocean. 



THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS 



OF 



GENERAL EUROPEAN HISTORY. 



THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS 



OF 



GENERAL EUROPEAN HISTORY. 



LECTURE I. 

Ctatises atttt tijctr iEffects, 

I was many years ago talking to a friend who has 
since risen to a very eminent position in one part of the 
world on some point or other of the early history of 
Greece. He put all such inquiries aside with the remark 
that no practical teaching could be gained from times and 
places where the art of printing was unknown. I was 
more lately talking to another friend who has long ago 
risen to an eminent position in another part of the world 
on the comparative merits of three forms of execu- 
tive government, all of them in being in the modern 
world. Those were the constitutional monarchy of 
England, the presidential system of the United States, 
and the federal council of the Swiss Confederation. 
I ventured to hint that, in the balance of merits and 
defects, the Swiss system had some advantages over the 
other two, and that it was at least worthy to be com- 
pared with them on equal terms. My friend, a man of 
great practical experience, was quite ready to weigh all 
u 205 



206 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

that could be said for and against both the English and 
the American system. Those were the systems of great 
nations, each of which might perhaps learn something 
from the other. But to any discussion of the Swiss 
system he could not listen at all. That was the system 
of a small nation, from which no practical lesson could 
be learned. It could not be worth while to discuss the 
institutions of so small a country as Switzerland. On 
these terms I did not think it worth while to go on with 
the argument any longer. 

The former of these stories I believe I have both told 
and discussed in print. The latter, in its exact shape, I 
have certainly not discussed in print. But I have dis- 
cussed at some length the advantages and disadvantages 
of the three forms of executive of which I was just now 
speaking, and the objection to any consideration of Swiss 
matters on the ground that Switzerland is a small coun- 
try is one which I did not hear for the first time in the 
conversation of which I have just spoken. I think you 
will be not be surprised to hear that I look upon both 
objections as shallow. But it is well that you should 
know at the beginning that I am at least fully aware that 
there are such objections. It may be well to warn gain- 
sayers at the outset that the doctrines that things are 
not worth attending to, either because they are small 
or because they are old, are doctrines which, with me 
at least, have quite lost the charm of novelty. I have 
heard them both very often, and I remain unconvinced 
by either. It may be that this only proves my own 
obstinacy. It may prove that I am unpractical, senti- 
mental, pedantic. I am quite used to be called all 
three on my own side of the Ocean. I may perhaps 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 207 

cherish a hope that I shall not be called by those names 
on this side of the Ocean. But if, by bad luck, I am, 
I am daring enough to think that I can live through it 
on one side as well as on the other. For I have long 
ago been thoroughly convinced, convinced, I almost 
fear, beyond the reach of argument the other way, that 
the qualities which are commonly meant by the names 
unpractical, sentimental, and pedantic, are exactly the 
qualities which are needed for the sound and thor- 
ough understanding of any practical matter, be its date 
past or present, be its scale great or small. For, in the 
course of a good deal of observation, I have learned to 
make two remarks : First, things have in the long run 
a way of turning out much more nearly as the unprac- 
tical and sentimental men expected them to turn out 
than as they were expected to turn out by the men 
who boast themselves to be specially practical. Secondly, 
I have noticed that arguments from past experience are 
received in very different ways, according as they fall in 
with or do not fall in with the notions of the person to 
whom they are addressed. The most logical argument 
from the experience of the past, the argument that like 
causes will probably lead to like effects, is thrust aside 
as " antiquarian rubbish " if it happens to tell against 
the ideas of the man who hears it. But the same man 
will accept with delight some merely sportive illustra- 
tion, some mere incidental likeness of place or circum- 
stance, perhaps the mere play or jingle of words and 
names, if only it happens to have the merit of telling 
in favour of his own ideas. 

Now the position for which I have always striven is 
this, that history is past politics, that politics are present 



208 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

history. The true subject of history, of any history 
that deserves the name, is man in his political capacity, 
man as the member of an organized society, governed 
according to law. History, in any other aspect, hardly 
rises above antiquarianism, though I am far from hold- 
ing that even simple antiquarianism, even the merest 
scraping together of local and genealogical detail, is 
necessarily antiquarian rubbish. I know not why the 
pursuits of the antiquary should be called rubbish, any 
more than the pursuits of the seeker after knowledge of 
any other kind. Still, the pursuits of the antiquary, the 
man of local and special detail, the man of buildings or 
coins or weapons or manuscripts, are not in themselves 
history, though they are constantly found to be most 
valuable helps to history. The collections of the anti- 
quary are not history ; but they are materials for history, 
materials of which the historian makes grateful use, and 
without which he would often be sore put to in doing 
his own work. The simple antiquary is not a histo- 
rian, but it is always a gain when the historian is an an- 
tiquary. If he is himself master of any or all branches 
of antiquarian research, he does his strictly historical 
work all the better. For by such knowledge he better 
understands for himself, and he can therefore better set 
forth to others, what manner of men they were who 
lived and moved and had their being in the time and 
place which he takes for the subject of his history. It 
is not too much to say that no kind of knowledge, of 
whatever kind, will be useless to the historian. There 
is none, however seemingly distant from his subject, 
which may not stand him in good stead at some pinch, 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 200, 

sooner or later. But his immediate subject, that to 
which all other things are secondary, is man as the 
member of a political community. Rightly to under- 
stand man in that character, he must study him in all 
the forms, in all the developements, that political society 
has taken. Effects have to be traced up to their causes, 
causes have to be traced up to their effects ; and we can- 
not go through either of those needful processes if we 
confine our studies either to the political societies of 
our own day or to political societies on a great physical 
scale. The object of history is to watch the workings 
of one side, and that the highest side, of human nature 
in all its shapes ; and we do not see human nature in all 
its shapes, unless we follow it into all times and all cir- 
cumstances under which we have any means of studying 
it. We do not rightly understand the present, unless we 
trace the present back to its causes in the past. We do 
not rightly understand the great political society unless 
we compare it with smaller political societies, unless 
we mark the points in which they agree and the points 
in which they differ, the points in which unlikeness is 
caused by difference in physical and other circumstances, 
the points in which likeness is caused by the common 
human nature working in both. In truth, a very large 
part of the historian's business is the tracing out and 
testing of likenesses and unlikenesses. He has no 
work more constantly on his hand than, on the one 
hand, to acknowledge likenesses and unlikenesses which 
are at once real and obvious, and to deal as may be 
needful with likenesses and unlikenesses which are 
sometimes real but not obvious, sometimes obvious 
but not real. It is no small part of the historian's 



210 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

business to point out real likeness amidst seeming 
diversity and real diversity amidst seeming likeness. 

When a historical parallel or a historical contrast — 
and a contrast is in truth one form of parallel — is sug- 
gested, whether as a mere illustration or as a practical 
argument from experience, the first business is to find 
out whether the suggested likeness or unlikeness is real 
or only seeming. We may always assume that like causes 
will produce like effects ; but, when we come to apply 
this rule to any particular case, we must take care to be 
sure that the causes are like. It may be that the likeness 
is real and essential ; it may be that it is merely inci- 
dental and on the surface. We must find out which it 
is before we begin to draw any inferences from it. And 
again, we must remember what kind of likeness it is 
that we must expect between one set of historical causes 
and effects and another. In one sense it is perfectly true 
that history is always repeating itself; in another sense 
it would equally true to say that history never repeats 
itself at all. No historical position can be exactly the 
same as any earlier historical position, if only for the 
reason that the earlier position has gone before it. The 
exact reproduction of any earlier event, any earlier cha- 
racter, any earlier political situation, is, strictly speaking, 
impossible. A conscious imitation differs from the origi- 
nal in the very important respect that one is an original 
and the other an imitation. And, even where the repro- 
duction is unconscious, where the likeness is simply the 
result of the working of like causes, still the two results 
can never be exactly the same, if only because the 
earlier result itself takes its place among the causes of 
the later result. Differences of this kind must always 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 211 

be borne in mind, and they are quite enough to hinder 
any two historical events from being exact doubles of one 
another. Further points of unlikeness there will always 
be, caused by differences of time and place, by differences 
in the national character of particular nations and in the 
personal character of particular men ; but this one cause 
of difference is inherent : one event is the earlier and the 
other is the later. But this is not difference enough to 
hinder real, essential, practical, likeness. Between parent 
and child, between master and scholar, there is the very 
important difference that one is the parent or the mas- 
ter, the other the child or the scholar ; but this does 
not hinder real likeness between parent and child, as dis- 
tinguished from members of other families ; it does not 
hinder real likeness between master and scholar, as dis- 
tinguished from members of other schools of teaching. 
So again, while we hold that like causes will produce 
like effects, we mean that like causes will always produce 
like effects, if the causes are left to their natural work- 
ing ; we must remember that one set of causes is often 
counterworked by another set, in which case the results 
will be different, because in truth the causes have ceased 
to be the same. In this way, even when a present set 
of causes seems to be, as nearly as the nature of things 
will allow, the same as a past set of causes, it would still 
be very rash positively to predict that the same results 
will follow. For the causes which we know of may be 
counterworked by other causes which we do not know 
of, and may thereby in truth cease to be the same causes. 
But we are perfectly safe in such a»case, if we say that 
the same results which happened before are likely to 
happen again ; that is, that they will happen, if no coun- 



212 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

terworking causes come into play. And we are there- 
fore perfectly safe in saying that it is the duty of practical 
good sense to bear in mind that a certain result, though 
not certain to happen, is likely to happen, and that no 
wise man will put that likelihood out of sight. Exact 
likeness between present and past, complete certainty as 
to the future, are things which never can be in an imper- 
fect world inhabited by imperfect beings. But such a 
degree of likeness between past and present as may give 
us practical lessons for the present, such a likeness as 
may create a degree of likelihood as to the future, I hold 
to be a thing which is very often to be found. And I 
hold further that it is the practical business of historical 
science, of the philosophy which teaches by example, to 
distinguish the cases in which such likeness does exist 
from the cases in which it does not. 

Again, we must carefully distinguish between causes 
and occasions. It is one of the oldest and one of the 
wisest remarks of political philosophy that great events 
commonly arise from great causes, but from small occa- 
sions. A certain turn of mind, one which is more con- 
cerned with gossip, old or new, than with real history, 
delights in telling us how the greatest events spring from 
the smallest causes, how the fates of nations and empires 
are determined by some sheer accident, or by the per- 
sonal caprice or personal quarrel of some perhaps very 
insignificant person. A good deal of court-gossip, a 
good deal of political gossip, passes both in past and 
present times for real history. Now a great deal of this 
gossip is sheer gossip, and may be cast aside without 
notice ; but a good deal of it often does contain truth of 
a certain kind. Only bear in mind the difference between 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 21 3 

causes and occasions, and we may accept a good many 
of the stories which tell us how very trifling incidents 
led to very great events. That is, we may admit that the 
trifling incidents led to the great events in the character 
of occasions ; we deny that they led to them in the cha- 
racter of causes. That is, we may admit that the trifling 
incident may have determined the exact time, the exact 
place, the exact form, of the great event; we deny 
that it was, in any true sense, the cause of the great 
event. It is only in a state of things where predisposing 
causes are already tending toward the great event that 
trifling accidents can at all effect the course of events. 
In such a state of things they may very well slightly 
delay or slightly hasten the course of events ; they may 
cause one spot to be the scene instead of another, they 
may, for a while at least, bring one man to the front 
rather than another. Where there are no predisposing 
causes, the trifling incident will not lead to the great 
event; and where there are predisposing causes, if 
one occasion does not present itself to lead to the great 
event, some other occasion will be found to lead to it at 
no great distance of time and place. As an instance of 
what I mean, I will not take any gossiping story of the 
caprices or quarrels of princes, courtiers, or mistresses. 
I will take a case where the immediate occasion more 
nearly befits the greatness of the interests at stake. I 
will take the case of the deliverance of Sicily from the 
Angevin yoke through the famous Sicilian Vespers. A 
single outrage done by a single Frenchman led to a 
general slaughter of Frenchmen, first in Palermo, and 
then in the rest of the island. But we may be sure 
of two things : First, A single outrage done by a single 



214 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Frenchman would not have led to a general slaughter of 
Frenchmen, if there had not already been good grounds 
for a bitter hatred of Frenchmen in general. Secondly, 
If that particular outrage had not happened to give the 
immediate occasion for revolt, some other occasion would 
presently have been found. What the actual outrage, 
in its character of immediate occasion, really determined, 
was that the revolt should begin on that particular day 
at that particular place, and not on some other day at 
some other place. So it is with crowds of other cases. 
It is perfectly right to mark the immediate occasion, and 
to give it its proper place in the story. But we must 
never allow ourselves to be misled into mistaking the 
immediate occasion for the true determining cause. 

Now when I speak of causes and occasions, when I 
speak of small personal caprices and quarrels, as being 
not the causes of great events, but merely the occasions, 
I wish it to be fully understood that I do not at all place 
the agency of really great men among mere occasions : 
I fully give it its place among determining causes. In 
any large view of history, we must always be on our 
guard against either underrating or overrating the actions 
of individual men.. History is something more than 
biography; but biography is an essential and a most 
important part of history. We must not think, on the 
one hand, that great men, heroes, or whatever we please 
to call them, can direct the course of history according 
to their own will and pleasure, perhaps according to 
their mere caprice, with no danger of their will being 
thwarted, unless it should run counter to the will of 
some other great man or hero of equal or greater power. 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 215 

The greatest man after all is but a man ; as a man, he is 
liable to weakness, liable to failure, whether the failure 
be due to his own fault or to circumstances over which 
he had no control. And, if we admit that there may be 
circumstances which even the greatest men cannot 
control, we admit that the greatest man is after all no 
angelic or Titanic being, but one of ourselves, more 
highly gifted doubtless than other men, but still a being 
of the same nature and the same passions as other men. 
But, on the other hand, we must not deem that the 
course of history is so governed by general laws, that 
it is so completely in bondage to almost mechanical 
powers, that there is no room for the free agency of 
great men and of small men too. For it is of no little 
importance that, while we talk of the influence of great 
men on the history of the world, we should not forget 
the influence of the small men. Every man has some 
influence on the course of history. It may be merely 
the influence of one unit in the mass, the kind of influ- 
ence which one vote in a vast constituency has in deter- 
mining an election. Neither A nor B nor C can say 
that it was his vote, as distinguished from the vote of 
any other man, which carried the election of the candi- 
date whom he supported. But it was only by A, B, and 
C and all the letters of the alphabet, acting each man 
exactly as if the election had depended on his vote only, 
that the election was carried as they all wished. So, not 
only in elections — which are often no unimportant part 
of history — but in all other matters, we are all of us 
constantly influencing history. For history is the record 
of the condition and doings of mankind, and each one 
of us, as a part or unit in the general mass of mankind, ' 



2l6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

helps to determine what the condition and doings of 
mankind shall be. We must take care not to be led to 
attach a meaning beyond the truth to phrases like laws 
of history, spirit of the age, national character. They 
all denote undoubted facts ; but they must not be mis- 
taken for unchanging physical forces, over which per- 
sonal human agency has no control. We are all of us 
influenced by the spirit of the age ; but then we all, each 
in his measure, help to determine, even if quite unknow- 
ingly, what the spirit of the age shall be. We are apt 
to forget that all changes, all fashions, be they changes 
in language, in dress, in politics, are really acts, though 
very often unconscious acts, of the human will. When- 
ever there is any change in usage, somebody must have 
done the act which set the fashion, even though he may 
have had no kind of notion that he was setting the 
fashion. The individual acts on the mass, and the mass 
acts on the individual ; but they both act, not by 
mechanical forces, as the language which we use might 
sometimes almost make us think, but as moral and intel- 
lectual agents, by a real, though often unconscious, exer- 
cise of the human will. So it is with that collection of 
human beings which we call a state or a nation. Each 
of its members is influenced by the spirit of the nation, 
its national character, its circumstances, its traditions, a 
thousand things which all the members of the nation 
have in common. But then each man in the nation 
helps, in his measure, to determine what shall be the 
character of all these national possessions. He cannot 
indeed determine what traditions shall be handed down 
to himself; but he does help to determine what traditions 
shall be handed on to those who come after him. Not 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 2\J 

only has every man the power to affect, if he chooses, 
the character of the community in which lives, and 
thereby of the age in which he lives ; as a matter of 
fact, he always is affecting it, whether he thinks about 
what he is doing or not. Every man who steadily obeys 
the law makes the community in which he lives more 
peaceful and law-abiding. He does in his measure the 
good work which our ancient Chroniclers attribute to 
righteous rulers; he does justice and makes peace. 
And every man who disobeys the law makes the com- 
munity in which he lives less peaceful and law-abiding. 
It is not merely that his example may lead others 
astray : his acts themselves of themselves help to 
change the character of the community for the worse. 
Natural philosophers tell us that every act done, every 
motion of the body, every sound uttered, by every man 
since man came into being has some lasting physical 
effect on the condition of the physical world. And 
I am quite sure that this is equally true in the moral 
world of history. All our actions, all our words, even if 
they seem to affect ourselves only, do, by affecting our- 
selves, affect the community of which we are members, 
and, by affecting that particular community, they affect 
that greater whole of which that community is a member. 
If then we are all of us in some sort making history 
all our lives, where, it may be asked, is the place for 
those specially great men whom we are used to look 
on as specially making history ? I answer that the great 
man is a being of the same nature as the small man, and 
that his influence is of the same nature as the influence 
of the small man. It is greater in degree, but it is 
essentially the same in kind. We all of us influence 



218 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

history in some measure, but the influence of most of 
us remains invisible. Some of us influence it in a 
greater measure than others, so much so that their influ- 
ence becomes visible in some particular place or among 
some particular class of men. Some few of us influ- 
ence it in so great a measure that their influence 
becomes visible to all men, and their names and acts 
are recorded in the general annals of mankind. But 
the difference between their influence and the influence 
of smaller men is only a difference of degree. If the 
great man influences his age, it is because he is himself 
influenced by his age. That is, if he influences smaller 
men, it is because he is brought under the same influ- 
ence as smaller men, or indeed because he is influenced 
by the smaller men themselves. For a man who stands 
altogether apart from his age, that is, a man who is not 
influenced by the other men who help to determine the 
character of the age, may be a great man in the sense 
of possessing great natural gifts ; he can hardly be a 
great man in the sense of having a great effect on his 
own time, and thereby on later times. He may stand 
apart from his age in the sense of being far in advance 
of it; but, if he is very far in advance of his age, he 
cannot become a leader of his age. Men are led by 
those who are in advance of themselves, but still only 
so far in advance that those who follow can at least see 
the leader, even if they do not know exactly whither he 
is leading. If the leader is so far in advance that he is 
himself out of sight, he ceases to be a leader. In this 
way men who have possessed the highest natural gifts 
have done but little, they have had but little effect on 
the world's history, simply because they were too far in 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 2ig 

advance of their own age to be its leaders. Lesser men 
who have more in common with those around them, men 
who are in advance of those around them, but only so far 
in advance that other men can see and follow them, may 
really do a greater work, and in that sense may be 
greater men, than men who by nature are more highly 
gifted. The opportunity needs the man, and the man \ 
needs the opportunity. Sometimes nations have only 
needed a worthy leader, and have not found one. Some- 
times men worthy to lead have been useless in their 
generation because they have found no fitting follow- 
ing. It has become almost proverbial that no one is so 
foolish as he who is wise before the time. The first 
discoverer seldom reaps the fame or the profit of his 
discovery. Those around him do not understand him, 
and, because others do not understand him, he hardly 
understands himself. He may scatter his seed ; but it 
takes no root, because the ground is not yet ripe for it. 
When the ground has become riper, the seed* is again 
sown ; it takes root and bears fruit. Some one else, 
when the age is ready for him, brings forward the old 
discovery again. Perhaps he lights by chance on some 
record of the forgotten discovery, and makes it his own ; 
perhaps he strictly makes the same discovery afresh, in 
utter ignorance that it has ever been made before. For 
it is an undoubted truth, though some minds find it hard 
to take it in, that the same discovery may be, and often 
has been, made independently over and over again, some- ( 
times in distant times, sometimes in distant places at the 
same time. In my own branches of study, I often light 
on things which I believe to be new, which at any rate 
are new to me, and about which I may fairly call myself 



220 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

an independent discoverer. But I find that it is always 
wise for any of us, in announcing our discoveries, to be 
prepared for the chance that some German scholar may 
have discovered them before us. In such cases I only 
ask the German scholar to be merciful. I ask him, on 
the one hand, not to think that I have knowingly stolen 
his discoveiy. I ask him, on the other band, not to 
despise me for not knowing about his discovery, if, as is 
most likely the case, he has stowed it away out of reach 
in some periodical or some local transactions, where I 
have not the faintest chance of hearing of it. 

But we must go back to the graver subject with which 
we were dealing, to that influence of great men on 
their fellows which I hold to differ only in degree and 
not in kind from the equally real influence of small men. 
If the great man is to do a great work, he must be a 
man of his own age, of his own nation ; he must be in 
the forefront of his age and his nation ; but he must be 
of them ; if he is so far in advance of them as to be out 
of sympathy with them, if he cannot understand them 
nor they him, he cannot be their leader. This may be a 
rather prosaic way of looking at heroes ; but I am sure 
that it is a practical way. It is not always the most 
brilliant characters in history that leave the greatest 
impress on history. Some of the greatest men, as far 
as their natural gifts went, some of the noblest men, 
have had little effect on the history of mankind, because 
they devoted themselves to impossible causes, because 
their ideas were too old or too new, or in some other 
way out of gear with the time and place in which they 
lived. The man who strives to call back a past state 
of things, the man who strives to bring in a future 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 221 

state of things which is still so distant that none but 
himself sees it to be future, will certainly not compass 
his object ; he may affect the history of mankind inci- 
dentally ; he will not affect it by doing the particular 
work which he seeks to do. I was reading a British 
periodical the other day, in which some shallow man 
tried to depreciate the personal greatness of Hannibal. 
Now surely, as far as natural gifts can go, as far as steady 
application of powers to a certain end can go, there 
never was a greater man than Hannibal. But he strove 
for an object which could not be gained; he was a man 
striving against a nation, and the nation naturally pre- 
vailed. The lasting effect of his career was the exact 
opposite to that which he sought ; instead of overthrow- 
ing Rome and exalting Carthage, he schooled the armies 
and people of Rome till they became the conquerors of 
Carthage. In the whole Imperial series the most bril- 
liant name after the first Caesar is the second Frederick. 
But what work did Frederick do ? Some of his ideas 
were behind his age, some were before it, some were out 
of the possible march of things for any age. He lacked 
too the moral greatness without which mere natural 
gifts lose half their power ; therefore the most brilliant 
of the Emperors was, for all practical ends, the last of 
the Emperors. Again, some great men seem to have 
done less than they really did, because while part of 
their work lived after them, part did not. I have known 
shallow people fancy that Alexander and Charles really 
did but little, because the vast dominion which they 
brought together broke in pieces when they themselves 
were gone. Now if they expected that their dominions 
would keep together, they erred with the common error 

15 



222 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of great men, who seem often to think that what they 
themselves can do others will be able to do after them. 
I suspect that Charles at least did not deceive himself 
in this way; the division of his dominions which he 
planned seems to show this. But be this as it may, the 
career of Charles the Great has influenced the history 
of the world ever since. As I once put it epigram- 
matically, he founded the German kingdom, and won 
the Roman diadem for its kings. All that has come 
of the great central fact of mediseval history, the fact 
that, in men's thoughts and feelings at least, the Roman 
Empire lived on and had the German king to its Empe- 
ror, all this, for good and for evil, came of the personal 
agency of the first Teutonic Caesar. But the personal 
agency even of the great Charles would have been of 
none avail, if he had not come at the right time, and if 
men's minds had not been ready to receive him. As a 
long series of effects came of his career, so a long series 
of causes had made the world ready for it. So with 
Alexander. His career certainly came to nothing, if he 
looked forward to leave a dynasty of Macedonian kings 
reigning from the Hadriatic to the Hyphasis. If this 
is the way in which we are to look at him, we must 
certainly say that, in much that he strove to do, he 
utterly failed. And, if we look at what he undoubtedly 
did only from the point of view of an Athenian patriot 
of his own day, we shall not speak of his deeds with 
much satisfaction. But in the oecumenical view of his- 
tory, the man who spread Greek culture over the East, 
the man who himself founded Alexandria, who made it 
possible for others to found Antioch and Seleukeia, the 
man who opened the path for the whole later being of 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 223 

the Greek nation and the Greek mind, the man who in 
effect founded the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox 
Church, is none the less memorable because his abiding 
work stopped at the Tigris, because it was only for a 
moment that his power showed itself on the Indus. 
What seems to be failure is often not really such. It 
is sometimes real wisdom to take aim a little further 
than the point which we really wish to hit. If it some- 
times happens that by striving after too much, we lose 
what we otherwise might secure, it also sometimes hap- 
pens that to attempt something more than we really 
wish to secure, is the best way of securing what we 
really aim at. In any case, Hannibal, Alexander, and 
Charles stand forth among the world's greatest men, 
none the less so because the career of Hannibal was 
wholly failure, because the career of Alexander and of 
Charles seems at first sight to be partly failure. But we 
have brought in both of them and great men in gen- 
eral as a kind of episode. I was talking, in a somewhat 
dry, general, way, about causes and effects, about causes 
and occasions. I merely said in a kind of parenthesis 
that the agency of great men might fairly be reckoned 
among causes. But it may not be amiss, thus early in 
our discourses, to strive to strike some kind of mean 
between overdone hero-worship on the one hand, and the 
tendency on the other hand which seems almost to look 
on history as a mere succession of mechanical results of 
mechanical causes. As I am old-fashioned enough to 
believe in the over-ruling power of the Creator of the 
world, so I am old-fashioned enough to believe that, in 
the world which He has created, each man has his place, 
each man has his influence. While neither a single man 



224 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

nor a community of men can choose the circumstances 
in which they find themselves, yet both a single man and 
a community of men has free choice of action in those 
circumstances. As the exercise of each man's will helps 
to determine the direction of the common will, so every 
man, however obscure he may deem himself, has laid upon 
him what I may call a historical responsibility, a share in 
guiding the course of the world for good or for evil, which 
he will never find any way to shake off his shoulders. 

Let us then go back to the point from which we 
turned aside, to our examination of the true bearing 
of historical parallels, to the practical teaching of real 
parallels, to the necessity of proving each seeming 
parallel, to judge whether it be a real parallel or no. 
I said that the tendency of the human mind is to be 
pleased with a parallel, however false, if it tells on one's 
own side, to sneer at a parallel, however true, which tells 
against one's own side. Now there are some parallels 
which prove nothing, but which yet are harmless, be- 
cause no rational person can think that they prove any- 
thing. A telling quotation, when the whole point lies 
perhaps in some accidental likeness of words and names, 
is perfectly fair as a rhetorical point, as long as as it does 
not pretend to be an argument. But then no one who 
is worth arguing with can mistake the mere likeness of 
sounds for an argument. A likeness which is in a cer- 
tain external sense real, but where the likeness is wholly 
incidental, where it does not arise from like causes pro- 
ducing like effects, is in itself equally fair as a rhetorical 
point ; but here rhetoric begins to be dangerous : some 
careless person may mistake the illustration for an argu- 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 225 

ment. Or he may at least fancy that he who uses the 
illustration means it for an argument, and may gravely 
go about to prove its fallacy. In late disputes in my 
own country I was one of those who did not look on the 
English occupation of Cyprus as a wise measure. In 
speaking of its unwisdom, perhaps less calmly than I 
am doing now, I referred to an earlier English occupa- 
tion of the same island. It did strike me as a singular 
coincidence, and one out of which a disputant might 
fairly make a rhetorical point, that Cyprus has been 
twice occupied by rulers of England, and that in 
each case the ruler of England who occupied Cyprus, 
though in both cases a native of England, was not in 
the fullest sense an Englishman. I do not mean to 
carry out the parallel between King Richard the First 
and the late Earl of Beaconsfield into any minute de- 
tail ; I fear that I should break down if I tried to do so in 
the minuter details even of their several occupations of 
Cyprus. But I thought that the parallel fairly told as a 
piece of rhetorical banter, which did not pretend to be 
an argument. For truly if there had been no stronger 
argument against the occupation of Cyprus, the wisdom 
of that measure might have remained unchallenged. 
Between King Richard's occupation of Cyprus and 
Lord Beaconsfield's occupation of Cyprus there is no 
real likeness of cause and effect which makes either 
throw any illustrative light upon the other. It is possi- 
ble, though not very likely, that one may have suggested 
the other. If so, the suggestion was purely artificial and 
arbitrary. There is no real likeness between the two 
things; the only practical lesson which the earlier 
event could supply to bear upon the later would be the 



226 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

fact that King Richard, when he had occupied Cyprus, 
got rid of it again as soon as he could. 

But let us turn from this superficial likeness, fair, I hold, 
as a rhetorical illustration, fallacious, if any one were fool- 
ish enough to take it as a serious argument, to what I 
believe to be a very real and practical lesson which the 
past history of the same part of the world may supply 
for the instruction of those who may have to decide its 
future history. I presume that nobody, except perhaps a 
professional diplomatist here and there, sees an eternal set- 
tlement, a line that will last for ever, in the frontier which 
is at this moment drawing between free and enslaved 
Greece. It may be convenient for the moment, and that 
is all. Some day the wisdom of Europe, instead of hav- 
ing to decide what parts of Greece shall be allowed to 
enjoy the benefits of law and freedom, and what parts 
shall be left in Turkish bondage, will have to grapple 
with the far harder question, Where shall the line be 
drawn between free Greece and free Bulgaria ? It must 
surely be the frightful difficulty of this question, a ques- 
tion which will never be solved so as to please both sides, 
which makes diplomatists so anxious to evade it by 
leaving an enslaved land between the two. But where 
two regenerate and advancing nations are concerned, 
such a put-off as this must be felt by every one to be 
a mere momentary put-off. Some day enslaved Greece 
must be united to free Greece, enslaved Bulgaria must 
be united to free Bulgaria. But where shall the line be 
drawn between the two free states ? Certainly not where 
Greek enthusiasts would draw it ; certainly not where 
Bulgarian enthusiasts would draw it. A glance at the 
map at three or four different periods of the world's 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 227 

history will give some practical help towards answering 
the question. Look at the extent of Greek settlement 
in those lands, the lands round the ^Egaean and the 
southern part of the Euxine, in the days when the first 
stage of Greek colonization had done its work under the 
old Greek commonwealths, and before the later stage 
under the Macedonian kings has begun. We see that 
in Greece or Hellas in the narrower sense the whole 
land is Greek, but that it is only within that narrower 
Hellas that the Greek race stretches from sea to sea. 
Elsewhere, coasts, islands, peninsulas, are Greek, but 
there are no Greek settlements far inland. The inner 
mass of the land, in Europe and in Asia, is held by 
some other people. North of Thessaly, there is mere- 
ly a Greek fringe on a barbarian body. Let us leap 
over fourteen or fifteen centuries, during which Greek 
influence advanced and fell back over vast regions of 
the East. First Macedonia, then Rome, played the part 
of the armed apostle of Greek culture ; the Persian, 
the Saracen, the Turk, each in his turn, appeared as its 
armed enemy. What was the result of this long strug- 
gle? Greek culture, Greek influence, is beaten back, 
not only from far distant Bactria, but from Syria and 
Egypt and the inland parts of Asia Minor. Towards 
the end of the eleventh century, when we may first 
begin to look on the Roman Empire of the East as 
becoming definitively a Greek power, we see that its 
extent differs wonderfully little, in Europe and in Asia, 
from the extent of the older Greek colonization. It 
may go a little further here, not quite so far there ; but 
the general look of the map of the old Greek colonies 
and of a map of the Empire of Alexios Komnenos is 



228 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

wonderfully alike. The Greek still keeps old Greece — 
a large part of it he has indeed won back from foreign 
invaders ; he keeps, as of old, the coasts, islands, and 
peninsulas, in Europe and Asia. But out of old Greece, 
he nowhere stretches from sea to sea. The Empire, both 
in Europe and in Asia, reaches further inland than the 
old colonies ; but its dominion still remains essentially a 
dominion of the coasts : the massive inland regions of 
Europe and Asia are held by other powers. But mark 
that those powers are no longer what they were at the 
earlier time. The old inhabitants of the inland regions 
have passed away; the Bulgarian in Europe, the Turk in 
Asia, has taken their place. But the Greek keeps his 
place ; he has lost vast regions which he had won since 
our former view, but what he had at the time of our 
former view he keeps still. Let us look again in our 
day. Endless revolutions have passed over the land 
since the end of the eleventh century ; the Frank and 
the Venetian have come and gone ; the Turk — I speak 
of Europe — has come and has begun to go. At the 
end of the eleventh century the great political powers 
answered, only roughly certainly, but still roughly, to 
national divisions. Since the end of the twelfth century, 
political divisions in those parts have had no reference 
to national divisions. Greek, Turk, Bulgarian, Frank, 
Venetian, simply held what they could, till in the 
end the Turk swallowed up all. But the disposition of 
nations and language is still — I speak of course roughly 
— very much what it was under the Komnenian Empire, 
very much what it was in the days of the old colonies. 
The Bulgarian still holds the mainland of Europe; the 
Turk still holds the mainland of Asia; the Greek, as 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 229 

he did in days before Turk or Bulgarian was heard of, 
still fringes the coast of both. 

Now, I would ask, when we look at this long story, is 
it mere antiquarian rubbish to put together such facts as 
these, and even to argue that they may have some prac- 
tical bearing on the affairs of our own time ? Such an 
argument must of course be prepared for the usual fate 
of such arguments. It may hope to be warmly welcomed, 
perhaps even to be looked at as a piece of political wis- 
dom, by those whose ideas it suits ; it will assuredly be 
scorned as antiquarian rubbish by those whose ideas it 
does not suit. But try and look at the matter calmly. 
Surely such an argnment as this is something quite differ- 
ent from a mere play upon words, or from the rhetorical 
use of an odd coincidence. Surely it looks as if there was 
something more in it than there is in my playful — some 
perhaps may rather say spiteful — parallel between the 
two occupations of Cyprus. When we see that, after so 
many revolutions, the Greek nation keeps essentially the 
same geographical position which it held more than 
two thousand years ago — when we see that, when there 
last was a great Greek power in the world, its extent 
was nearly the same as the extent of the Greek race and 
language now — there surely is no absurdity in believing 
that we have here something very like an indication of 
manifest destiny. Surely we cannot be wrong in think- 
ing that something not very far off from this strangely 
abiding frontier should be the frontier to be finally drawn 
between the Greek and the barbarian in Asia, between 
the Greek and his fellow-Aryans in Europe. And, when 
we speak of a manifest destiny, it is not a blind destiny ; 
it is a destiny which goes upon very good reasons. We 



23O PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

can see why the Greeks have so firmly held this par- 
ticular extent of territory, and why they have not suc- 
ceeded in holding much more. A scholar of our own 
day has wisely said that neither the Greeks in any other 
land nor any other people in the Greek lands could have 
been what the Greeks in the Greek lands actually were. 
He was speaking of the Greeks of many ages back ; but 
between the old Greeks and the new Greeks there is less 
difference than one might have looked for. There is 
only that difference which cannot fail to be after so many 
ages have past, ages crowded with so many and so bale- 
ful changes in the South-eastern lands. At all events, the 
old and the new Greek are alike in one thing ; the true 
home of both is the sea, above all, their own yEgaean. 
Greek dominion, Greek influence, the Greek tongue 
itself, were in a manner out of place at any great dis- 
tance from its coasts. Along its coasts, among its penin- 
sulas and islands, the Greek and all that pertains to him 
is at home in the fullest sense. It is on the sea, above 
all on the ^Egsean sea, that the Greek was twice great 
in former days ; it is on the sea, above all on the ^Egaean 
sea, that he has his fairest chance of being great again. 
Among all changes, he has been able to hold the coasts 
and islands ; no change has made him able to keep a 
lasting dominion on the mainland. Surely here is a 
practical lesson from reason and experience. We see ef- 
fects and we see their cause. And we see that that cause 
is not a passing or incidental, but a real and abiding, 
cause. It is a cause which has its roots deep in the 
physical character of a land, in the national character 
of its people. From the abiding working of that cause, 
through so many ages, so many changes, we may surely 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 23 1 

make practical inferences which may deserve another 
name than that of antiquarian rubbish. From so long 
a past, a past continued in the present, we may surely 
learn at least general lessons as to the future. We can 
hardly be wrong in arguing that, when the day of settle- 
ment comes for the South-eastern lands of Europe, the 
share to be allotted to the Greek must be a share not 
very different in extent from those lands of eastern 
Europe and western Asia within which the old Greeks 
settled as colonists and the house of Komnenos reigned 
as Emperors. 

From such an instance as this I think you will under- 
stand the general method which I propose to follow in 
speaking of the practical bearing of the history of past 
times. My guide is experience ; my one dogma is that 
like causes lead to like effects, provided only that those 
causes are not counterworked by other causes — which 
is the same as saying that they cease to be like causes. 
This last limitation is always an important one; it 
teaches us to use not a little practical caution. We 
may be sure that our rule will work in every case to 
which it applies ; but it is often hard to say whether a 
particular case is one to which it applies or not. With 
this caution before us, if I am asked how far we can 
venture, from what we know of the present and the 
past, to say anything as to the future, I should answer 
that, if we are wise, we shall say very little positively, 
but that we may, without rashness, say a good deal 
negatively. It can hardly ever be safe to say that a 
thing will happen ; it is very often, not only safe, but 
the part of practical wisdom, to say that a certain thing 



232 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

is not unlikely to happen, and that it is only prudent 
so to shape our course that we may be ready for it 
if it does happen. That is to say, putting the matter 
in a more abstract shape, there are causes at work which, 
if left to themselves, will bring the expected event to 
pass ; but it is quite possible that they may be hindered 
from doing so by other counterworking causes. It is 
often wise to look forward to a certain event as likely 
to happen, unwise to pledge ourselves to it as certain 
to happen. But, if it is so much as likely to happen, it is 
unwise so to act as it were quite certain not to happen. 
Our guide experience will often teach us that something 
is going to happen, when it does not teach us exactly 
what is going to happen. It often teaches us that the 
present state of things is going to be changed, without 
teaching us exactly what state of things is coming in 
its stead. The little cloud is rising out of the sea ; the 
chances are that the little cloud is the beginning of the 
great storm; but what exact direction the storm may 
take, what exact amount of harm or of good — for storms 
sometimes do good — the storm may work, that the 
really wise man will not undertake to foretell. But, 
because he cannot tell exactly what will come of the 
storm, he will not therefore act as if he were sure that 
no storm was coming. Now this last is what the 
practical man, the statesmanlike man, the man who is 
above antiquarian rubbish, so commonly does. The 
so-called practical man is the man who will not see 
anything but what is- immediately under his nose, who 
refuses to look either forward or backward. The sen- 
timental man, the unpractical man, the man of anti- 
quarian rubbish, does look both forward and backward ; 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 233 

and he is laughed at by the practical man for so doing. 
But somehow things have a way of turning out as the 
sentimental man expected them to turn out, not as the 
practical man expected them to turn out. I think both 
sides of the Ocean will bear me out in saying that every 
great cause, every great movement, has first of all to go 
through the stage of being snubbed and laughed at by 
practical men, by statesmanlike men. But the great 
cause, starting with a few sentimental followers, beats 
the practical men in the end. It is a real historical law, 
it is almost a physical law, that all great movements 
should go through this first stage, and a very whole- 
some stage it is, of scorn on the part of those who think 
themselves wise. But again mark what is proved and 
what is not. We may safely argue that a movement 
may have truth and right on its side, and may succeed 
in the long run, although practical men sneer at it. But 
it would not do to argue that every movement which 
practical men sneer at has therefore truth and right on 
its side and will succeed in the long run. For the prac- 
tical man sneers at all proposals ; he therefore sneers at 
the foolish proposals as well as at the wise ones. And 
because some of the proposals which he sneers at turn 
out to be foolish and unsuccessful, he gives himself all 
the more credit for practical wisdom, and forgets all the 
wise and successful proposals which he sneered at just 
as much. Still, though the boasted practical man, 
though even the hand-to-mouth diplomatist, the man 
who patches up a thing for a year or two and calls it 
an eternal settlement, may by some chance be right, the 
chances are strongly against his being right. For such 
men always shut their eyes to half the facts of the case; 



234 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

the professional diplomatist indeed is professionally 
bound to do so. It should never be forgotten that it 
was in the fore part of the year 1 870 that the profes- 
sional diplomatists assured mankind that there never 
was a time when the peace of Europe ran less chance 
of being disturbed. 

I spoke just now of the abiding historical boundary 
of the Greek people and the Greek language. What if 
I should look forward to a day when a Greek prince may 
sit on the throne of Constantinople ? What if I should 
look forward to a day when the nations of South-eastern 
Europe may be united under some kind of federal sys- 
tem ? The mention of either of those events as even 
possible would draw forth the scornful laughter of prac- 
tical men everywhere. Now to the scornful laughter of 
the practical men I should simply answer, What you 
laugh at as impossible commonly comes true. You 
laugh at the thought of a prince of Athens reigning in 
the New Rome, Please to remember how you and your 
like laughed not so long ago at the thought of a prince 
of Savoy reigning in the Old Rome. You laugh at the 
thought of an union of South-eastern Europe. Please 
to remember how you and your like laughed not so 
long ago at the thought of the union of Germany and 
the union of Italy, at the thought that the Northern and 
Southern States of the American Union could ever come 
together again. All the great events of our day, all the 
great events of earlier days, have been declared in their 
turn by practical men to lie beyond the range of practical 
politics. But the range of practical politics has a strange 
way of widening, and it commonly widens so as to let in 
the things which the sentimental men deemed to be at least 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 235 

likely, while the practical men pronounced that they 
never could come to pass. Do I say that either of the 
events which I hinted at will come to pass in our day, or 
come to pass at all ? Far be it from me to say so. I am 
no prophet neither am I a prophet's son. There are 
causes at work which may bring about either ; there are 
other causes at work which may hinder either. I do not 
say that either of them will happen ; but I do say that 
I shall not be surprised if either of them does happen. 
I do say that they both lie within the range of practical 
politics ; I do say that a really wise man, one who walks 
by reason and experience, who looks both backward and 
forward, who looks not only to the present but to the past 
and the future, will not look at either thought as an ab- 
surdity to be laughed at, but as a possibility — not more 
— to be seriously borne in mind. 

In this my opening lecture I have been sometimes de- 
sultory, sometimes abstract. That has been because it is 
my opening lecture. In those that follow I trust to be 
both less desultory and less abstract. I have wished at 
starting to let you know what will be the general line of 
thought which you may expect to find in the series of 
discourses which you have asked me to give among you. 
I began with two stories which implied that to my mind 
at least it seemed that the history and institutions of 
the Greek commonwealths of former days, of the one 
European federal commonwealth of our own day, were 
objects from whose study, the men of later times, the 
men of political societies on a greater scale, need think 
it no scorn to learn something. I hold before all things, 
that man, civilized and political man, European man — if 



236 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

you will allow me so to extend that word so as to take 
in lands which are in truth a new and vaster Europe 
beyond the Ocean — is essentially the same being in all 
times and in all places, that there is no political commu- 
nity, whatever may be its form of government, whatever 
may be its physical scale, from which some political in- 
struction may not be gained. I have hinted at two 
classes of communities as rich in such instruction. I 
have pointed to the commonwealths of old Greece as 
able to teach us something, though their citizens did not 
know the art of printing. I have pointed to the federal 
union of modern Switzerland as able to teach us some- 
thing, though its territory is not so large as the United 
States or even as the United Kingdom. I trust, as I go 
on, to carry you along with me in such a view both of 
these communities and of some others. When I next 
meet you here, I trust to begin at the beginning, the 
beginning of history as far as I am concerned. I shall 
start at a point which is a late period for the geologist, 
a late period for the primaeval antiquary, a late period 
for the Eastern scholar, but which is the beginning of 
things for the political historian, for the historian of 
man in his highest form. We will begin with the first 
beginnings of that great chain of events which has 
made civilized and Christian man all that he now is 
on both sides of the Ocean. We will meet within 
that group of islands and peninsulas where man first 
learned the lesson that freedom is a noble thing. We 
will make our hearth and home on the sacred hill 
of the city where men first learned to settle their 
differences, not by slaughter or banishment of the weak- 
er side, but by the fair debate and the free vote. There 



CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS. 237 

is no spot on the earth's surface which we can so fit- 
tingly make the starting-point in our inquiry as the 
parent state of justice and freedom, the great demo- 
cracy of Athens. 

16 



LECTURE II. 

2Ti)e JBnuoctattc (ffittg. 

I began my first lecture by telling of a remark which 
seemed to me not a little shallow, namely, that we in 
modern times could learn nothing from the political 
experience of the old Greek commonwealths, because 
the men of those commonwealths had no knowledge 
of printing. Now he who made that objection did not 
put his own case so strongly as he might have put it. 
He might have said with perfect truth, not only that 
the old Greek commonwealths had no printing, but that 
they had very little writing. And what a paradox shall 
I be thought to utter if I say that in some respects the 
faculties of the men of those old commonwealths were 
strengthened and quickened by the very fact that they 
had no printing and very little writing. Do not think 
that I wish to undervalue those two very useful arts, 
arts of both of which I have made a good deal of use 
in the course of my own life. I do not wish in the 
least to call in question the general belief that they have 
on the whole done much for the intellectual improve- 
ment of mankind. But I do not the less venture to 
say that, like many other good things, they have had 
a bad side as well as a good one ; they have certainly 
tended to weaken some of man's faculties ; there have 

238 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 239 

been states of society which have been in some respects 
the better for their absence or their less frequent use. 
The main use of reading and writing, and of that im- 
proved form of writing which we call printing, is the 
accumulation and preservation of knowledge. For that 
end they are invaluable. If some forms of scientific 
research might be carried on without them, they could 
hardly be recorded without them; of historical research, 
writing, in some shape or other, is a necessary condition. 
Yet there can be no doubt that our familiarity with 
reading and writing has done much to weaken some 
of our mental faculties. To the power of memory the in- 
vention of writing dealt a heavy blow, and the invention 
of printing dealt one yet heavier. As each of those 
stages made it easier to record events, men took less 
trouble to remember them. It is easy for us to note 
down a thing for ourselves ; it is easy for us to turn to 
the record of it in some book written by another. A man 
whose whole note-book and whole library is in his own 
brain is in quite another case. The stores of his know- 
ledge will be in one sense much smaller than ours ; but 
what he does know he will know in a clearer and more 
abiding way, and in some kinds of knowledge he will 
actually be ahead of the man of note -books and libra- 
ries. It is very likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were 1 
put together without writing ; it is quite certain that 
not a few men in old Greece knew them by heart. And 
even if some of these in later times learned them from a 
written copy, it was because written books were scarce, 
because they were not in such common use as to have 
much effect on men's habits, that they learned them by 
heart at all. Now to compose those poems, even to 



240 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

remember those poems, without the help of writing, 
implies an intellectual developement in some directions 
far beyond that of any living scholar. It implies the 
presence in the very highest degree of the two powers 
of attention and memory. Where writing does not 
exist, even where it is comparatively rare, where it is a 
somewhat difficult business, the possession of a distinct 
class, employed only on special occasions or for special 
purposes, the powers of attention and memory will, 
among a people of any intellectual gifts at all, be devel- 
oped to the very highest point, to a far higher point than 
they are ever likely to be among a people with whom 
reading, writing, and printing are matters of everyday 
use. 

Now, if any of us in modern times, if any existing 
community in civilized Europe or America, were to lose 
the arts of reading, writing, and printing, or even to lose 
their daily and familiar use, that community would, 
beyond all doubt, suffer an unutterable loss. They 
would suffer not only intellectually, but politically. 
They would not only sink in the scale of mental cul- 
ture; they would find it hard, if not impossible, to car- 
ry on the machinery of a free constitution. But I will 
undertake to say that the citizens of the old Greek 
commonwealths did not suffer in anything like the same 
degree from being altogether ignorant of printing, and 
comparatively unfamiliar with reading and writing. In 
one sense this is a truism: no man, no community of 
men, suffers in the same way from the mere absence of a ■ 
thing to which they are not used as they suffer from the 
positive loss of a thing to which they have already 
become used. To go back is a much worse business 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 24 1 

than simply not to go forwards. But I hold that my 
doctrine is true in a much more, special sense than this. 
In the political and social state in which the ancient 
commonwealths found themselves, the familiar use of 
reading and writing was by no means of the same para- 
mount value to them which it is to us. Remem- 
ber, I am not speaking of a state of things where 
reading and writing are wholly unknown, but only of 
a state of things where they are not in familiar use. 
I mean a state of things in which writing is perfectly 
well known, where public and private acts are recorded 
on stone or brass, where there is already a lettered class 
which reads and writes books ; but Where reading and 
writing are not the common possession of every man, 
where men of high natural intelligence and of no small 
amount of acquired culture are still unable to read and 
write. This must in some sort be the case wherever 
printing is unknown ; it is printing which brings read- 
ing and writing really within the reach of every man ; 
where reading and writing go no further than inscrip- 
tions and manuscript books, they will always remain the 
special possession of a particular class. Till printing 
comes, many men will be unable to read to whom both 
reading and writing comes naturally when printing is 
once brought in ; and, what we sometimes forget, many 
men who can read will not think it their business to 
learn the special, almost professional, art of writing. 
Such were our own forefathers before the latter days of 
the fifteenth century ; and, without in the least wishing 
to depreciate ages among some of which my own studies 
have chiefly lain, I could not venture to claim for these 
in some sort unlettered ages the same average amount 



242 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of intellectual culture which I do claim for those ages 
of Greece which were unlettered in the same sense. 
To our mediaeval forefathers the great diffusion of the 
arts of reading and writing which followed on the in- 
vention of printing was a boon beyond all words. I 
do not believe that it would have been in anything like 
the same degree a boon to the people of the Athenian 
commonwealth, or, in its measure, to the people of any 
other Greek democratic commonwealth in the days of 
old Greek independence. 

The state of things in those ancient democracies 
was one to which we have no exact parallel in any part 
of the modern world; it had no exact parallel in any 
part of the mediaeval world. Close as are the analogies 
between the commonwealths of old Greece and the com- 
monwealths of mediaeval Italy, the points of difference 
are quite as striking and instructive as the points of like- 
ness. We must conceive a state of things in which each 
city is absolutely independent, or at least a state of things 
in which the absolute independence of each city is the 
political ideal. For it may easily happen that this or 
that particular city may, at this or that particular time, 
be in a state of greater or less dependence on some 
greater city. But every city either was independent or 
deemed itself wronged if it was not independent. So 
strong was the feeling of independence that even a fed- 
eral union was repugnant to the instincts of the Greek 
cities, till in later times they found that safety against 
foreign enemies could be obtained only by that partial 
surrender of independence by each state which a federal 
system implies. The older Greek federations are found 
only among the ruder tribes of the nation, those which 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 243 

had not fully reached the perfection of Greek city life. 
Among all the more advanced members of the nation 
the absolutely independent city was the one political 
ideal. Greek cities planted colonies ; those colonies were 
as much Greek cities, as much members of the general 
Greek body, as the mother-cities which planted them ; 
they were from the beginning free and independent states, 
and needed not a War of Independence to make them so. 
Each city had those full powers of action, those powers 
of war and peace and every other attribute of independ- 
ence, which we are accustomed to connect, not with single 
cities, but with nations or other powers of great extent. 
Above all, in this your great federal continent, you 
are used to see sovereign states, many of them greater 
by far in extent on the map than the whole range of 
continuous Greece, which, while keeping for many pur- 
poses perfect independence in their own hands, still 
surrender to a central power those attributes of inter- 
national action which each Greek city claimed to itself. 
The independence of each city was a doctrine stamped 
deep on the Greek political mind by the very nature of 
the Greek land. How truly this is so is hardly fully 
understood till we see that land with our own eyes. The 
map may be do something ; but no map can bring home 
to us the true nature of the Greek land till we have stood 
on a Greek hill-top, on the akropolis of Athens or the 
loftier akropolis of Corinth, and have seen how thor- 
oughly the land was a land of valleys cut off by hills, of 
islands and peninsulas cut off by arms of sea, from their 
neighbours on either side. Or we might more truly say 
that, while the hills fenced them off from their neigh- 
bours, the arms of the sea laid them open to their neigh- 



244 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

bours. Their waters might bring either friends or ene- 
mies; but they brought both from one wholly distinct 
and isolated piece of land to another. Every island, every 
valley, every promontory, became the seat of a separate 
city ; that is, according to Greek notions, the seat of an 
independent power, owning indeed many ties of brother- 
hood to each of the other cities which helped to make 
up the whole Greek nation, but each of which claimed 
the right of war and peace and separate diplomatic inter- 
course, alike with every other Greek city and with powers 
beyond the bounds of the Greek world. Corinth could 
treat with Athens and Athens with Corinth, and Corinth 
and Athens could each equally treat with the King of the 
Macedonians and with the Great King of Persia. And, 
when the time came, such of them as had not given up 
that power to a central federal authority, could treat, as 
city to city, with the Senate and People of Rome. How 
close the Greek states are to one another, and yet how 
physically distinct they are from one another, it needs, 
for me at least, a journey to Greece fully to take in. 

Now what has this to do with the presence or absence 
of reading, writing, and printing ? Much every way. 
Cities in such a position as those which I have just 
described were in constant need of those faculties which 
I have ventured to say that reading, writing, and printing 
tend to weaken rather than to strengthen. Single cities, 
not all of them great cities, not all of them like Athens 
and Corinth, many of them small towns which, according 
to our notions, would deal at home only with small local 
matters and would send one or more representatives to 
a distant capital to give a voice in greater national affairs, 
had to entertain, each one for itself, questions on an 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 245 

international scale, such questions as in modern times 
are debated in the cabinets of great kingdoms. And 
how had they to entertain them ? Herein perhaps come 
the greatest of all differences between their way of trans- 
acting public business and ours. In modern times, even 
in constitutional states, even in highly democratic states, 
the department of foreign affairs is that which is shrouded 
in the greatest degree of mystery ; it is that over which 
the nation and the representatives of the nation exercise 
the least amount of direct influence. Among the Greek 
commonwealths the case was directly opposite. Foreign 
questions were entertained, questions of war, peace, and 
alliance were decided, by the most popular body known 
to the constitution. In a democracy such matters came 
before the judgement of the whole people; in an aris- 
tocracy they came before the whole of the privileged 
class among the people. The cause of the difference is 
obvious. In a great modern state it is comparatively 
few who have any direct personal knowledge of foreign 
affairs or any direct personal interest in them. It is only 
comparatively few who are directly and personally af- 
fected even by a foreign war. But in a system of sepa- 
rate city commonwealths, when the foreign enemy, 
instead of being perhaps a great empire thousands of 
miles away, is likely enough to be the nearest market- 
town — when the campaign, whether offensive or defen- 
sive, will be waged within a few miles, when every man's 
house and fields run a chance of being laid waste by the 
enemy — then foreign affairs directly and personally touch 
every man ; there is nothing in which every man has a 
more direct and personal interest, nothing of which every 
man is more likely to have, or to believe that he has, a 



246 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

more direct and personal knowledge. He has little need 
of newspapers, telegrams, special correspondents, when, 
by climbing a hill, he can very likely look into an enemy's 
country on one side and into an ally's country on another. 
In such a state of things the discussion of foreign affairs 
cannot be left to any small or secret body; war and 
peace, of all things, must come for the judgement of the 
whole people, or, even in an oligarchy, for the judge- 
ment of the whole privileged order. For I need hardly 
say that in these small commonwealths representation 
is unknown; whatever powers may be entrusted to 
individual magistrates or to smaller councils, the su- 
preme authority must rest with an assembly in which 
every qualified citizen gives his vote in his own person. 
Now here comes in the widest field for that form of 
intellectual training which was open to every Athenian 
citizen, and, which, I feel sure, made the intellectual 
average of the Athenian citizen higher than that of the 
average representative in any modern political assembly. 
In such an assembly in any European or American com- 
munity we may surely assume that every member can at 
least read and write ; but I can hardly flatter my own 
age by believing that there are many modern legislatures 
where the average standard can be placed so high as it 
stood in the ekklesia of Athens. Many an Athenian 
citizen could not write ; if he could read at all, his read- 
ing hardly went beyond spelling out some legal formula 
carved in brass or marble. But if he did not read, he 
heard. He heard those masterpieces of political oratoiy 
to which the world turns with admiration after so many 
ages. What political education could there be like 
listening to Perikles, and knowing that it was his busi- 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 247 

ness, when he had listened to Perikles, to give his per- 
sonal vote for or against the proposals of Perikles ? 
That was quite another thing from simply reading the 
orator's speech in a newspaper the next morning, and 
having no opportunity of giving any personal vote at 
all. We, in the free states of Europe and America, have 
many opportunities of speaking our minds, many oppor- 
tunities of indirectly influencing the course of national 
affairs ; but we none of us have, even those whom we 
send to represent us in our national assemblies but rarely 
have, to make it part of our ordinary business to listen 
with our own ears to the arguments of the greatest mas- 
ters of human speech, and then to help to decide by our 
own votes on such issues as whether the Peloponnesian 
war shall begin or no. 

Among all English-speaking assemblies at this moment, 
the Congress of the United States is the only one which 
can ever be called on to give a direct vote in any such 
matter. And the control of Congress as a whole, even 
the special control of one branch of it, over matters of 
war, peace, and foreign affairs generally, though greater 
than any powers vested in the British Parliament, seems 
slight, when compared with the direct and constant con- 
trol exercised by the Athenian Assembly. Or rather 
" control " is not the right word ; the Assembly did more 
than control ; the shortest way of putting matters would 
be to say that the Assembly was Secretary of State, 
President, Senate, and House of Representatives all in 
one. As for other assemblies, I need not say that no 
State legislature, no legislature in any British colony, 
can deal with such matters at all, while the British Par- 
liament itself deals with them only indirectly. And I 



248 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

cannot help thinking that the average Athenian citizen 
gave, whether a wiser vote or not, at least a vote more 
directly affected by the debate, than is often given in 
any modern assembly. In one sense there was more of 
party spirit in old Greece than there is in the modern 
world ; in another sense there was less. Setting aside 
the plots of professed murderers and votaries of anarchy, 
there is nothing in modern politics at all answering to 
the furious factions of oligarchs and democrats in old 
Greece, factions which were seldom satisfied without the 
driving out, sometimes not without the actual slaughter, 
of the side which might prove to be the weaker. But 
on the other hand, I suspect that, within the bounds of 
an acknowledged democratic constitution, there was less 
of party spirit, less of mechanical party voting, that votes 
were more likely to be won by an eloquent and well- 
reasoned speech, than they are now. Those were indeed 
the palmy days of speech, when men listened instead of 
reading, when they were guided by the voice and the 
tones of the living orator. But mark also that what is true 
of the Athenian in his political character is true of him also 
in every other character. In everything the Athenian pub- 
I lie was a hearing, not a reading, public. Poetry came to 
them in the same shape as oratory. They did not read 
Homer ; they heard him recited. They listened to the 
tragic and comic poets with all the accompaniments of 
song and dance. The father of their philosophers wrote 
nothing whatever; he disputed at the corners of the 
streets with all whom he met. The increased prevalence 
of reading and writing which is marked by the philo- 
' sophical discourses of Plato, by the political pamphlets 
of Isokrates, belongs to the time of the decline of Athe- 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 249 

nian political greatness, above all to the time of the 
marked decline in the public spirit of her citizens. The 
comparatively illiterate fifth century before Christ is a 
time of far greater Athenian energy than the compara- 
tively learned fourth century. But take the two centu- 
ries together; what the average of Athenian intellect 
was we may judge by the character of the intellectual 
food that was set before it. It was no mean order of 
intellect to which men could venture to address the 
speeches of Perikles and the tragedies of ^Eschylus. ' 
And remember that ^Eschylus, Perikles, Sophokles, 
Euripides, Aristophanes, all the poets, all the orators, 
down to the day when Demosthenes and ^Eschines wran- 
gled over the Crown and the False Embassy, were all of 
them poets and orators who did not address any select 
class, specially learned or specially refined, but spoke 
to the Athenian people as a whole. Now of both the 
tragic poets and the orators in the assembly the distin- 
guishing feature is a certain dignity and austerity, a 
severe purity of taste and style, the very opposite to 
anything which could be called popular in any disparag- ' 
ing sense. When men would venture to put forth such 
speeches, such poems, before the general mass of their 
countrymen, it shows how high the general intellectual 
level of their countrymen stood. Nor does the licence 
of the old comedy prove anything to the contrary. 
There is in it indeed a strong element of buffoonery and 
indecency, but even that is the buffoonery and indecency 
of genius, and it alternates, in Aristophanes at least, 
with poetry so sweet and graceful, with wit of so high 
and refined an order, that Attic comedy, no less than 
Attic tragedy, must be accepted as part of the evidence 



250 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

for the generally high intellectual level of the Attic 
people. 

Now, when we look at a people like this, a people 
who could habitually come together in their own city 
for the discussion, and, not the mere discussion, for the 
decision, of public affairs, and, who, when they came to- 
gether, heard the most weighty questions debated by the 
greatest of orators — a people the chief attraction of whose 
holidays was the performance of the loftiest efforts of 
dramatic poetry in both its branches — a people among 
whom at the same time the noblest works of architec- 
ture, painting, sculpture, were coming into being, not at 
the bidding of private patrons and amateurs, but for 
the common adornment of the city, — we ask, Was there 
in such a people any lack which an enlarged familiarity 
with reading, writing, printing, would have supplied? 
The press, had it existed in those days, might have pre- 
served to us some precious pieces of Greek literature 
which we have lost, but it could have had but little 
effect on the general character of Athenian political 
life. A free press might have been a great gain under 
the despotism of the Roman Empire ; it could not have 
made political life under the Athenian democracy freer 
or more open than it was. Athenian life was spent in 
keeping the powers of attention and memory at their 
highest point. The habit of trusting to the written 
record instead of to the living voice might have done 
something to weaken both of them. It would have been 
no political gain, but quite the opposite, if the power of 
reading a speech of Perikles or Demosthenes in the next 
day's newspaper had led the citizen who lived at Mara- 
thon or Sounion to stay at Marathon or Sounion, instead 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 25 I 

of coming to listen and vote at Athens. We should 
have been endless gainers if we could turn to reports, 
printed or written, of all the debates in the Assembly, 
instead of having preserved to us only a few of the 
greatest efforts of the greatest speakers. But we may 
doubt whether to the living contemporaries of Perikles 
and Demosthenes our gain in this way would not rather 
have been a loss. 

But my own argument may perhaps be turned against 
me. I may be told that I have myself shown more 
conclusively than anybody else that we in our days can 
learn nothing from the political experience of these 
ancient commonwealths. What, it may be said, can we 
have in common with states with whom not only print- 
ing was unknown, but even reading and writing were 
comparatively unfamiliar, with states whose condition 
was such that it may be doubted whether the invention 
of printing, whether any enlarged use of reading and 
writing, would have been any real boon to them ? Sure- 
ly such men must be as far apart from us, their political 
experience can be of as little advantage to us, as if they 
had been inhabitants of another planet. The difference 
certainly is great, yet I venture to maintain that the 
points of likeness between us and them are incompar- 
ably more and greater than the points of difference. It 
perhaps does not prove very much to say that we have 
in common with them all that we possess as sharers 
with them in one common human nature. For that we 
share no less with other forms of the human race from 
whose political experience, if they have any, we do not 
seek for much instruction. And yet it would perhaps 



252 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

be dangerous to say that there is any branch of the 
human race which is absolutely without institutions, or 
from whose institutions we may not learn something. 
There has been a good deal of research lately made in 
this direction, sometimes in a really philosophical spirit, 
sometimes merely after the fashion of scrap-gathering 
and reckless guessing. And when such researches are 
carried on in a really philosophical spirit, we whose 
studies are of a more special kind, who do not take 
as our range all mankind, but only some branches of 
mankind, can only hail those who make them as fellow- 
workers. If I can show that a certain institution is 
common to all Teutons or to all Aryans, and if another 
inquirer can go on further and show that it is common 
to all men, he has done me no wrong. He has in no 
way weakened my position ; he has rather enlarged and 
strengthened it. All I ask of him is that he shall carry 
into the less known regions of inquiry the same rules of 
careful and scholarlike reasoning which are looked for 
in those who deal with the better known regions. We 
must not be expected to accept facts and to make infer- 
ences in the case of Red Indians and Australians on 
evidence which we should set aside as inconclusive if 
we were making inquiries about Greeks or Germans. 
Whether we believe in creation or evolution or anything 
else — and for my part I do not see that creation and 
evolution are in the least contradictory — there is a deep 
interest in tracing out how much there is that all forms 
of man have in common, how large is the common 
heritage, moral, social, and political. But these wider 
branches of research are not mine ; I must stop as my 
ordinary bound at the limit which parts off the Aryan 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 253 

from the non-Aryan ; I must not venture so much as 
to cast my eyes beyond the limit which parts off the 
inflected tongues from the non-inflected. So far as this 
last point we must sometimes look; so far we must 
look for our immediate purpose of this moment; we 
cannot take in the position of the Greek people and 
the Greek mind in the history of the world, without 
at least some general notion of the position of the 
Phoenician, the Hebrew, and the Arab. So, if we were 
speaking, not of Greeks, not of our intellectual fathers, 
but of the rudest tribe on the face of the earth that 
had any institutions at all to show, I should still be 
loath to say that we could learn nothing from the 
working of those institutions. But for my Greeks I 
claim something more. First of all, I claim for them 
the rights of kinsmen, kinsmen of the common Aryan 
stock, sharers in the common heritage of speech, of 
institutions, and of beliefs, which the common fore- 
fathers of them and us brought from the Eastern cra- 
dle-land of the common family. To those of us whose 
minds were trained in youth, fed, guided, strengthened, 
by the study of old Hellenic lore, it is a thrilling and 
an ennobling thought to feel that that old Hellenic lore 
is but one part of a heritage in which we ourselves are 
sharers, that the undying tale of Homer has in not a 
few of its elements a common origin with the tales to 
which we listened at our mothers' knees. It is no small 
matter to feel that that deathless tongue — which, be it 
remembered, was enabled to surpass all other tongues 
because those who spoke it knew no other tongue — the 
tongue in which Homer sang the deeds of heroic days 
in the simple speech of heroic days — the tongue in 
17 



254 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

which Pindar in more artificial strains recorded the 
praises of the victors in those national rites which, 
among bitter rivalries and cruel warfare, still kept up 
the remembrance that the Hellenic folk was one — 
the tongue in which the tragic and the comic poet 
held up the godlike men of past days to the peo- 
ple's worship, and the party-leaders of their own day to 
the people's scorn — the tongue in which Thucydides 
first taught men to prefer the possession for all time to 
the amusement of a moment, and in which Polybios, 
walking in his path, recorded the working of that ancient 
federal power within the bounds of whose vaster repro- 
duction it is my privilege now to stand — the tongue in 
which Aristotle set forth for his age, and has so largely 
handed down to us, the whole sum of the knowledge 
of his time, and, as its most precious part, the political 
lessons which he learned from the working of a thou- 
sand independent commonwealths — above all, the tongue 
in which the leaders of freemen first spoke to freemen, 
the tongue in which great speakers first guided great 
assemblies, the tongue in which Perikles called on the 
citizens of a ruling state to strain every nerve to keep 
the dominion which they had won, and in which the yet 
nobler voice of Demosthenes called on the citizens of a 
declining state to strain every nerve, not for dominion, 
but for freedom — and, may I go on to add, the tongue 
which was chosen out of Aryan tongues to be the means 
of handing on to the Aryan nations of Europe and 
America the oracles of the faith which we learned from 
Semitic teachers — the tongue which led captive the 
tongue of Rome — the tongue in which the best of 
Roman Emperors set down the workings of his wearied 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 255 

spirit — the tongue of Christian fathers and Christian 
councils, and the tongue of that virtuous and erring 
prince who strove against them, so gallantly and so 
vainly, in the cause of the elder gods — the tongue 
which, as the tongue of the New Rome, ousted the 
tongue of the Old as the Imperial speech of Eastern 
Christendom — the tongue which lived on, in sorrow and 
in hope, through long ages of barbarian bondage — the 
tongue which has sprung again to life in our own day as the 
tongue of a regenerate and advancing people — the tongue, 
if I may speak of myself, which I deem it no small priv- 
ilege to have myself heard and spoken in rejoicing and 
sorrowing gatherings of Hellenic freemen, — it is with 
no small thrill of brotherhood that we feel that the 
tongue which has such a histoiy as this is, after all, only 
a sister-dialect with our own tongue, that the stock is 
the same, that a crowd of words are the same, that we 
cannot speak of the earliest and most endearing of 
human relations, that we cannot speak of father and 
mother, of brother and daughter, without using words 
which, from the prae-historic days of the old dispersion, 
have remained part of the common possession of Hel- 
lenic and Teutonic man. 

There is then between us and these old Greeks the 
tie of kindred, the tie of a common origin, a kindred 
tongue, a common store of beliefs, traditions, primitive 
customs, primitive institutions. But if we are sharers 
in all these things with the Greeks, so we are with the 
Latins, the Slaves, the Lithuanians, the Celts, even with 
the Albanians. But towards the Greeks there is a tie 
which binds us nearer than it binds us to any of these, 
even to the Latins themselves. To the Greeks we owe 



2 $6 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

whatever of homage, whatever of thankfulness, we owe to 
those who were in all things our forerunners, our guides, 
our teachers. Without ruling which of the Aryan nations 
was the first to make its way into Europe, without ruling 
which of the Aryan tongues has parted the least from 
the primaeval mother-speech, for all practical purposes 
the Greeks are entitled to the respect due from younger 
brethren to the elder. Brethren as they are in origin 
and speech, I think that I am justified in the words 
which I used some time back when I spoke of them as 
our intellectual fathers. In art, in science, in the song of 
the poet, in the speculations of the philosopher, in the 
records of the historian, they led the way. They led 
the way too in the discipline of the warrior, in substi- 
tuting the ordered phalanx of Sparta or Thebes for the 
tumultuous array of an Asiatic army. And they too 
led the way in the highest work of all : they were the 
first to establish the true fellowship of law and freedom, 
to work up the rude elements of primitive institutions 
into such finished works of political skill as the pure 
democracy of consolidated Athens and the modified 
democracy of federal Achaia. They were the first to 
substitute the influence of speech and reason for the 
blind bidding of an arbitrary will, the first to decide 
questions of war and policy by the free vote of the 
people fairly taken, the first to give to the citizen accused 
of crime, to the citizen whose rights were disputed, a 
fair trial before his peers, a trial by the judgement of 
citizens sworn to give a righteous verdict according to 
the law. To us at least they are practically the authors 
of all these things. It might be dangerous, among the 
endless steps in political progress which the common- 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 257 

wealths of Greece and the commonwealths of Italy 
took quite independently of one another, to rule in all 
cases whether this or that step was taken first in Italy 
or in Greece. The political wisdom of the Latin hardly 
lagged behind that of the Greek, though the course of 
political developement often differed widely in the two 
kindred lands. But to us the Greeks come first; we 
know from contemporary witnesses what were the in- 
stitutions of not a few Greek cities at a time when we 
know the institutions of Rome herself only by the flick- 
ering light of tradition, or by the ingenious putting 
together of a crowd of incidental and unconscious 
notices from this source and that. We see the Athe- 
nian democracy in its most finished form, listening to 
its orators, raising its walls and gates and temples, rul- 
ing over its subject cities, keeping the Great King at 
three days' distance from its own coasts, — we see all 
this by the light of contemporaiy writings and contem- 
porary inscriptions, at a time when we can at most dimly 
see that the two orders at Rome were at the height of 
their long struggle, and that Rome is taking the first 
faint steps towards winning back her lost headship over 
the Latin cities. The political course of the Athenian 
democracy is over before the mixed constitution of the 
Roman commonwealth has reached its full develope- 
ment. In these points the only question that can be 
raised is a question of precedence, and that a question 
of precedence between Aryan kinsfolk. In political mat- 
ters the Greek may have been before the Italian, or the 
Italian may have been before the Greek ; but no rational 
person can think either that the Italian copied from the 
Greek or that the Greek copied from the Italian ; still 



258 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

less can any rational person think that either Greek or 
Italian needed political lessons from any barbarian mas- 
ter. As to matters of art, the case is somewhat differ- 
ent. Let me tell my own experience. I first gained any 
knowledge of Greek matters at a moment when literal 
belief in the tales of Kadmos and Kekrops had passed 
away, and when the wide field which has been opened 
by modern orientalists had not yet been touched. In 
those days we made it a kind of point of honor to hold 
that everything Greek was original, except the alphabet, 
which we could not deny that the Greeks learned from 
the Phoenicians. We comforted ourselves by saying 
that of the gift we had to allow that the Greeks borrowed 
from the Phoenicians the Greeks made much better use 
than the Phoenicians had ever made. But now the old 
belief has come up again in a more scientific shape. 
We hear much of the influence of Egyptians, Chal- 
daeans, Phoenicians, and of the last discovered candi- 
dates for greatness, the Hittites. I could almost wish 
to leave these questions to the decision of a generation 
yet to come. The new teaching is so eagerly pressed 
by its votaries as the only scientific teaching, yet it 
grates so unpleasantly on ears used to what in my 
younger days we deemed to be scientific teaching, that 
I could almost wish to hand over the whole matter to 
those who may some day be able to look more impar- 
tially into the whole question than either side can look 
just now. But I suppose that we shall be at least safe in 
saying that, even if the first rudiments of architecture or 
of any other art were brought to Hellas from some bar- 
barian soil, the Greek at least gave to all that he bor- 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 259 

rowed a life, a force, a grace, which made it wholly his 
own. This will be only applying to other things the 
measure we have all along applied to the alphabet. How 
little the mere possession of a gift can do is seen if we 
compare the history of Carthage with the history of 
Greece and Italy. In the hands of the men of Tyre and 
Sidon the alphabet remained in a literal sense a dead let- 
ter ; in the hands of the Greek it became clothed with the 
spirit that giveth life. In fact, the question whether 
Greece did or did not borrow from this or that barba- 
rian people some rude germs of art which in Greece 
a 1 one were taught to grow into flowers and fruit has 
little more than an antiquarian interest. It is very far 
from being a matter of antiquarian rubbish, but it is 
not a question of the same inborn and living interest 
as the tracing up the tongues and the institutions of the 
kindred nations to the common stock. Whatever the 
Greeks may have borrowed in some rude shape became 
their own in its higher developement. They borrowed 
the alphabet from the land of Canaan ; let it be, if any 
one wishes it, that they borrowed some rude approach 
to the Doric column from the land of Ham. Yet none 
the less the literature and the art of Greece is, in every 
higher sense, as strictly original as its political develope- 
ment. As no man of Tyre or Sidon, no man of Memphis 
or hundred-gated Thebes, ever devised aught like the 
Athenian assembly and the Athenian court of justice, so 
neither could he write a Prometheus or build a Parthenon; 
he could not breathe into the stone the human life of 
Hellenic deity ; he could not bid the work of his hands 
stand forth in the virgin dignity of the Athenian Pallas 
or in the imperial majesty of Olympian Zeus. 



260 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Let us now run, hastily as it must needs be, through 
the main lines of the political experience of these com- 
monwealths, so far removed from us in time and place 
and scale, and which, we are assured, because they were 
small, because they were ignorant of printing, can teach 
us nothing. Yet surely something may be learned by 
seeing how closely the general developement of political 
institutions follows essentially the same lines, and at the 
same time how widely such institutions are modified in 
detail by differences of time, place, and circumstance. The 
more than likeness, the absolute sameness, of the earliest 
Hellenic and the earliest Teutonic institutions has often 
been pointed out ; it is a subject on which I have my- 
self enlarged in more shapes than one. In both we see 
the same three essential political elements — the king or 
chief, the inner council of elders or nobles, the genera! 
assembly of the people. One is tempted to say that we 
have here the rough foreshadowing of King, Lords, and 
Commons, of President, Senate, and House of Repre- 
sentatives. And from some points of view it may not 
be inaccurate to say so. In strict historical succession I 
suspect that the inner council is more truly represented 
by the Privy Council than by the House of Lords or the 
Senate ; but in a rough general view of things we see in 
the primitive and in the modern constitutions the same 
great essential elements. To the Greek mind these three 
elements seemed so necessarily implied in the mere idea 
of any political society that the polity of the Gods on 
Olympos is coloured after the type of the polity of their 
worshippers in Ithake or before Ilion ; Zeus, no less 
than Agamemnon, has his inner council and his popular 
assembly. I need not say that, whether the chief, 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 261 

whether the inner council, is hereditary or elective, 
holding office for life or only for a season, is purely a 
question of detail. As far as we can go back, the Greek 
king is hereditary, the Roman king is elective, and the 
earliest republican magistrates, both in Greece and in 
Italy, carried on the kingly power, hardly lessened as to 
its mere range of its authority, but hampered by repub- 
lican conditions, perhaps by the presence of a colleague, 
perhaps by a fixed term of office, in any case by a more 
distinct responsibility to the nation in some shape or 
other. So is your President an elective, responsible, 
four years, king, representing the King of Great Britain 
exactly as the archon represented the Athenian king and 
the consul the Roman king, keeping an authority essen- 
tially kingly, an authority narrower in its range than the 
authority of a King of Great Britain, but in the exercise 
of which the President can follow his personal will far 
more freely than the King can. And, though the change 
from King to President was recorded in printed books, 
while the change from King to archon was at most 
graven on a stone, I would still ask whether there is not 
some instruction in marking how, in such distant times 
and places, the process of change took so very nearly 
the same form. Mave we not here a political lesson ? 
have we not here a moral lesson ? Do we not better 
understand the essential unity of man's nature among 
all differences of time and place and circumstance ? Do 
we not see how like causes may be reasonably looked to 
produce like effects ? Have we not hit on one of those 
real and practical parallels, which may act as real beacons 
or real warnings, and which, I venture to think, rise not 
a little above the level of merely antiquarian rubbish ? 



202 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN PIISTORY. 

The general truth is that wise and healthy political 
societies, whether large or small, whether acquainted 
with printing or ignorant of it, while always ready to 
change when change is really needed, never change for 
the sake of change ; and when change is needed, they 
work their changes, as far as possible, within the ancient 
lines. They prefer to reform what is old, rather than to 
devise something which is wholly new. So did the 
Athenian, the Roman, and the American reformers. 
Shallow observers are, I believe, chiefly struck with 
the difference between the political systems of Great 
Britain and of the United States. What amazes me is 
their wonderful likeness, the small amount of change 
which it was found needful to make, the loving retention 
of ancient principles, the general careful working within 
the ancient lines. And in all this I see a witness to the 
wisdom of the famous men who reformed, rather than 
devised, the political system of this great commonwealth. 
And I see in it too a witness to the wisdom of those 
shadowy beings, as they seem to us, who in the same 
sort, in days before the first light of history, reformed 
the constitutions of Rome and Athens. 

Of the three elements in the primaeval polity, we may 
safely say that in a free and healthy developement, it is 
the power of the king or chief which has a tendency to 
lessen, the power of the popular assembly which has a 
tendency to grow. It was, I think, an error in the 
greatest English-speaking expounder of old Hellenic 
politics, to undervalue the ruder forms of the popular 
assembly, such as we see in the Homeric poems, because 
they have not reached the full developement of the ek- 
klesia of Athens. This is really like blaming a child 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 263 

because he has not yet reached the full stature of a man. 
The Homeric assembly, we are told, is submissive, and 
does not dispute the will of the king. So as a rule it 
is ; but it is the submission of a child, not the submission 
of a slave ; it is the submission of a body which has not 
yet formed the wish to oppose, not the submission of a 
body which wishes to oppose, but dares not. The kings 
and great men undoubtedly sway the Homeric assembly 
in a way in which none but the chosen leader of the 
people could sway the Athenian assembly ; but that 
again is simply the difference between childhood and full 
growth ; the child willingly and becomingly accepts 
guidance in matters in which it is the duty of the full- 
grown man to learn how to guide himself. But the 
men of the Homeric time have already found their way 
to all the essential attributes of a free assembly. Free- 
dom does not necessarily imply opposition ; it only 
implies the power of opposition, if ever opposition 
should be needful. The Homeric assembly has in its 
possession that hidden power which belongs to every 
assembly which has the free use of its voice. The crowd 
which to-day shouts Yea, Yea, to every proposal, has 
the power of shouting Nay, Nay, to-morrow, if proposals 
should be made to-morrow to which the shout of Nay, 
Nay, would be the right answer. 

In the fully-developed Athenian constitution we see 
the three Homeric elements still in force, though vastly 
changed in relative force. The popular assembly is 
supreme ; its will decides everything. The people is in 
the strictest sense sovereign; magistrates are but the 
ministers who carry out its will. And those magistrates 
who historically represent the ancient kings have hardly 



264 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

so hicrh a function as to be the ministers of its will. The 
king has gradually changed into the archon for life, the 
archon for ten years, the nine archons for a single year. 
Election has displaced hereditary succession ; by another 
change, the lot has displaced election. The archons do 
not even preside in the political assembly ; it is only in 
the courts of justice that the faintest shadow of their 
ancient majesty cleaves to them. Yet all has been done 
by gradual, regular, constitutional, change. Violence, 
revolution, conspiracy, illegal action of any kind, is at 
Athens always the weapon, not of the democratic 
reformer who grows into the democratic conservative, 
but of the oligarch who first withstands change and 
then seeks to change things back again. Meanwhile the 
other element of the primitive polity, the inner council, 
survives under the Athenian democracy in a twofold 
shape. There is the immemorial council of Areiopagos, 
which may well have been the primitive council living 
on. Beside it there is the special council of the matured 
democracy, the Council of Five Hundred. This is an off- 
shoot from the popular assembly ; but it is an offshoot 
which could hardly have come into being, either at 
Athens or in other democratic commonwealths, if the 
notion of a council of some kind had not been handed 
down from the earliest times as something no less essen- 
tial to a finished polity than the general assembly and 
the king or magistrate. The three elements, chief, 
council, assembly, lived on, in some shape or other, alike 
in aristocratic and in democratic constitutions, as long 
as Greek independence lasted. Nay they lived on as 
long as the shadow of independence lived on in those 
Greek cities of Roman times, which, after real freedom 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 265 

had passed away, still kept the form of sovereign com- 
monwealths, allies of Rome, when their real position was 
that of municipalities of the all-conquering Empire. 

But before those days came, one change had taken 
place which for American students of political history 
must ever have a special interest. The system of per- 
fectly independent cities was proved and found wanting. 
In the best times of Greece the perfect independence of 
every city, great and small, had been a political ideal 
and no more. It had been constantly interfered with by 
the supremacy of greater cities over smaller. But mark 
that it remained strictly the supremacy of city over city, 
of commonwealth over commonwealth. The dependent 
commonwealth which Athens or Sparta or Thebes re- 
duced to the payment of tribute or to the contribution of 
men and ships to wars waged in the sole interest of the 
ruling city, did not thereby cease to be a commonwealth. 
It remained a separate commonwealth, shorn indeed of 
many of the attributes of an independent state, but still 
preserving all such of them as were not formally sur- 
rendered to the ruling city. Chalkis submitted to the 
power of Athens, and by a formal treaty accepted Athe- 
nian superiority. But Chalkis still remained a common- 
wealth, keeping every power of a commonwealth which 
was not formally transferred to Athens. You on this 
side of the Ocean will understand me when I say that 
the reserved rights of Chalkis were but small, but that 
they were reserved rights. Athens claimed that all 
causes of importance between Chalkidian citizens should 
be carried to Athens to be judged by Athenian courts 
according to Athenian law. But none the less was 



266 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Chalkidian authority the rule, and Athenian authority 
the exception. All causes which the treaty did not form- 
ally transfer to Athenian authority remained as before 
to be judged by Chalkidian courts according to Chal- 
kidian law. Thus, even in bondage, the separate city 
remained the ideal. A city in the strict sense it must be ; 
a mere village is not enough ; not a few of the cities of 
Greece arose out of the joining of several neighbouring 
villages to form a common city. But of the union of sev- 
eral distinct cities, standing apart, each with its own terri- 
tory, to form one greater political whole, Greek history 
contains one example only. The twelve cities of Attica, 
at some time to which we cannot give a date, merged 
their independent being in the one political community 
of Athens. Eleusis, Marathon, and the rest, did not 
become subjects of Athens or dependencies of Athens. 
Their citizens received the full Athenian franchise ; all 
Attica in a manner became Athens. And of this unique 
event largely came the greatness and the power of 
Athens. Sparta had a far larger territory ; but it was a 
territory chiefly inhabited by unwilling subjects. Thebes 
stood out among the cities of Bceotia, as the encroaching 
and unpopular chief of an ill-assorted federation. Athens 
alone had a territory within which every freeman was a 
citizen of Athens, a territory as large as could possibly 
be administered according to the political doctrine of all 
Greece, that the franchise of the citizen must be exercised 
personally by himself in the general assembly. Sparta 
then had a greater number of subjects ; Thebes had an 
equal number of doubtful allies ; no city could boast 
like Athens of so great a number of free and equal 
citizens. 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 267 

But it was found at last that the system of absolutely 
independent cities broke down when Greece was threat- 
ened by a kindred and civilized enemy on her own 
borders. I do not hesitate to give those names to 
Macedonia, as Macedonia stood in the days of Alex- 
ander and his successors. In my view of things, the 
kings of Macedonia had all along been the Greek kings 
of a quasi Greek people. I look on the old Macedonians 
as a people more nearly akin to the Greeks, and endowed 
with a greater power of adopting Greek culture, not only 
than the Semitic Phoenician, but than the Aryan kins- 
folk of Persia, Thrace, and Western Asia. Against Greek 
kings, commanding a powerful and united kingdom, a 
kingdom which had begun to be penetrated by Greek 
culture, and in which Greek military discipline had been 
carried to a perfection surpassing that of Thebes or Spar- 
ta, the separate cities of Greece could no longer bear up. 
They could beat back the undisciplined myriads of Asiatic 
empires ; they could not beat back kings like Philip and 
Alexander, Demetrios and Antigonos. And besides the 
Macedonian there was now the Epeirot. The Molossian 
Pyrrhos might pass for an enemy of Greece when he 
joined Korkyra to his realm and make Ambrakia his 
capital ; but he at least deemed himself the champion of 
Greeks beyond the sea in his warfare against the bar- 
barians of Carthage and of Rome. Against such foes 
union was needful ; but what form was union to take ? 
Mere dominion, supremacy thinly veiled under the name 
of alliance, had been found not to be enough. Thebes 
called herself the head of a Boeotian confederacy ; but 
who were so eager in the work of wiping away Thebes 
from the earth as the men of Thespia and Plataia, cities 



268 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

which had been wiped away from the earth by Thebes 
herself in her day of might ? A form of union at once 
closer and more willing had to be found, a form under 
which many commonwealths might, in the face of com- 
mon enemies or allies, be as one commonwealth, without 
destroying the freedom and separate being of each, 
without making any city the subject or dependant of any 
other city. The key was found in the wider extension 
of that form of polity with which all of you must neces- 
sarily be better acquainted than I can be, even though 
it is a form of polity which I have long made a special 
object of study. This is, I need hardly say, that system 
of Federal Government by which the attributes of sove- 
reignty are divided, by which many commonwealths 
agree to become one commonwealth in all matters which 
concern their relations to other powers, while they agree 
to remain many commonwealths in all matters which 
concern the internal affairs of each only. Such a system, 
or at least close approaches to it, had long been known 
in Greece, but hitherto it had been prevalent only among 
the more backward members of the Greek nation ; never 
till the Macedonian times were any of the great and 
famous cities of Greece bound to one another by a tie 
of this kind. The reason is plain ; for a great city, per- 
haps a ruling city, to surrender the most cherished 
attribute of independence was no small sacrifice. And 
the most cherished attribute of independence was sur- 
rendered when a city agreed to have all its relations to 
other cities and powers settled for it by some council or 
assembly in which it had only one voice among others. 
It is not wonderful then that the Federal system began in 
Greece among the more backward tribes among which 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 269 

the full growth of Greek city life had never shown 
itself— that it was next extended to the smaller cities 
which sooner learned that there was no strength but in 
union, and which found that equal federation was a better 
form of union than subjection to a ruling head. But it 
was only slowly, and in some cases unwillingly, that the 
great cities consented to sink their absolute independence 
in any federal union, and some of them, Athens above 
all, never entered into any federal connexion at all. Still 
in the later days of Greek independence by far the 
greater part of the soil of Greece was mapped out among 
a system of federal unions. Of these the great- 
est and most illustrious, the League of Achaia, which 
gradually grew into a League of all Peloponnesos, has 
always struck me as being one of the most striking and 
instructive political phenomena in history, and not the 
least as being in many respects a wonderful foreshadow- 
ing of the greater Confederation on whose soil I now 
stand. 

The League of Achaia was a league of small states, 
of states which did not know the art of printing ; yet 
surely there is something well worthy of our study in 
the fact that two confederations, so widely removed in 
time and place and scale, should show so many points 
of likeness as are shown between the United States of 
Peloponnesos and the United States of North America. 
But at present it will suit my purpose better to speak 
of a point of unlikeness. While the position of the 
Peloponnesian cities and of the American colonies had 
enough of likeness to lead to much of likeness in the 
federal constitutions which they severally devised, they 
differed in one important point, in that point in which 

18 



-270 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

the old Greek commonwealths differ as a class from the 
states of modern Europe and America. The unwilling- 
ness of many of the greatest cities of Greece to enter 
the Achaian League or any other of the Greek federal 
systems was not wholly unreasonable. When Corinth, 
Argos, Sparta, Elis, joined the League, some willingly, 
some unwillingly, the sacrifice which they had to make 
was greater than that which a smaller city had to make. 
In the federal assembly, the sovereign authority of the 
League in matters of peace and war, every citizen of every 
confederate city had a right to appear; but the votes 
were taken, not by heads but by cities. Each city had 
one vote, and no more. The greatest city and the small- 
est, the city from which one citizen was present and the 
city from which a thousand citizens were present, had 
the same voice in deciding the general judgement of the 
assembly. Such an arrangement was manifestly unfair 
to the great cities ; it was unfair that Corinth should 
have no greater voice in the affairs of the League than 
Tritaia ; it was unfair that Corinth should have to sub- 
mit to a declaration of war or to the conclusion of a 
peace against which Corinth had given her single voice, 
and which had been decided against her by the single 
voice of Tritaia. But the only other arrangement which 
was possible according to Greek political ideas would 
have been no less unfair to the smaller cities, and still 
more unfair to the distant cities. This would have been 
to count, not by cities but by heads, to let the decision 
of the assembly go by the simple majority of those who 
happened to be present in it. This would clearly have 
been to give an unfair advantage to the great cities, and 
still more to the neighbouring cities. If the assembly 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 27 I 

was held in one of the great cities, its citizens, who 
could come in a body, could easily have out-voted all 
the rest of the League. A city which was at once small 
and distant would have had practically no influence 
whatever. The system actually followed was certainly 
less unfair than this would have been. For though it 
was unreasonable that Corinth should have formally no 
greater voice in the affairs of the League than Tritaia, 
we may be sure that Corinth always enjoyed a much 
greater share of practical influence than Tritaia. 

Now in your federal system, and in the federal system 
of Switzerland, which in this respect follows yours, both 
these forms of unfairness are avoided. The problem is 
this : Given a confederation the members of which are 
in one sense equal, in another sense unequal. Such are 
the cities of Achaia, the cantons of Switzerland, the 
states of North America. As members of an equal 
union, entering it willingly on equal terms, enjoying 
equal rights, the cities, cantons, states, are in the strictest 
sense equal. But, on the other hand, in all the three 
confederations the members are manifestly unequal in 
extent of territory, in wealth, in population, in military 
resources. The question is how to respect both the 
equality and the inequality. The states are equal in 
rights and dignity ; no state therefore must be treated 
in any way as inferior to any other state. But it would 
be practically unreasonable to give the smallest state 
exactly the same influence in the affairs of the Confed- 
eration as the greatest. You have solved the problem, 
the Swiss have adopted your solution of it, by the estab- 
lishment of a federal assembly formed of two houses. 
One of these embodies the equality of the states, the 



2/2 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

other embodies their inequality. You have one house 
which represents the states as states, in which each state, 
great and small, has an equal voice. You have another 
house which represents the federal nation directly as a 
nation, and in which each state is represented strictly in 
proportion to its population. Thus both dangers are 
avoided ; the small states are not swamped by the great 
ones, neither are the great ones swamped by the small 
ones. Perfect fairness can be dealt out to both classes, 
while in Achaia some measure of unfairness would not 
fail to be done to one or the other class, and in the system 
which was actually adopted some unfairness was actually 
done to the greater cities. Now wherein lies the differ- 
ence, what is it that has enabled America and Switzerland 
better to deal with this great problem in federal govern- 
ment than Achaia did or could deal ? This whole differ- 
ence lies in the one word " represent." In the Greek 
cities there was no representation; they knew not the 
political device of later times by which certain chosen 
citizens are commissioned to act on behalf of their fel- 
lows, by which a select assembly is entitled to act in the 
name of the people. Hence comes the real difference 
between those ancient commonwealths and the states of 
our own day. The citizens of a Greek commonwealth, 
consisting of a single city and its surrounding territory, 
could and did habitually meet in one place. The rule 
applies alike to oligarchic and to democratic constitu- 
tions. In both alike the sovereign authority was vested 
in the general assembly of all qualified citizens. Whether 
this last phrase was or was not equivalent to all citizens, 
a most important difference for many purposes, made no 
difference for this purpose. In either case all who were 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 273 

qualified to vote at all voted directly, and not through 
representatives, in the greatest affairs of state. Such a 
constitution as this is now unknown except in six of the 
smallest Swiss cantons ; it was the primitive constitution 
of some of your states ; it is so no longer. This is simply 
because, with these few exceptions, the political commu- 
nities of modern Europe and America, small as some of 
them seem as compared with others, are still too large 
to allow of all their citizens habitually meeting in one 
place. As compared with the city commonwealths of 
Greece, they may all pass for great states. They were 
therefore all used to representation in their internal con- 
stitutions. When therefore the American constitution 
was framed in the last century, when the Swiss consti- 
tution was framed in the present, the states which formed 
the two Confederations were perfectly familiar with re- 
presentation in their local constitutions; they could there- 
fore easily apply that system to the federal constitution, and 
could apply it in such a way as to represent the two great 
facts of the federal union, the equality of the states and 
their inequality. The Achaians, unused to representa- 
tion in their several cities, failed to take the great step 
of inventing it as something new for use in their federal 
system. Here comes the real difference between small 
states and great ones. Modern Switzerland, though it 
certainly knows the use of printing, is, we are told, too 
small for England or America to learn anything from its 
political experience. Yet I think that I have shown that, 
in some not unimportant respects, the political experience 
of America is exactly the same as that of Switzerland. 
Small as Switzerland may be, I think you will hardly 
despise the witness which that land bears to the wisdom 



274 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of your institutions in adopting some of them for its own 
use. And the witness is the more valuable because the 
tribute which Switzerland has paid to America is not 
the tribute of blind imitators. Switzerland has adopted 
some of the institutions of America, those which suited 
its condition and agreed with its political traditions. 
Other American institutions, which did not suit the con- 
dition of Switzerland and did not fall in with its political 
traditions, it has not adopted. That is, once more, like 
causes produce like results, so far as they are like causes. 
And the rule works all the same, even though both the 
causes and the results may differ a good deal in physi- 
cal size. Wisdom, freedom, regard to the conditions of 
one state and of another, are elements which go further 
towards the making of political constitutions than differ- 
ences in extent on the map or distance in the chronolog- 
ical table. And these great moral influences themselves 
seem hardly capable of physical measurement. 

And now one word to wind up with regard to the matter 
with which we began, the presence or absence of print- 
ing — I might perhaps add the presence or absence of 
the electric telegraph. When the remark about printing 
which I quoted was made, the most advanced regions of 
Europe and America were as ignorant of the electric 
telegraph as the old Athenians and Achaians were of 
the art of printing. For aught I know, some very go- 
ahead persons of the new generation may by this time 
despise the times before the electric telegraph in as lordly 
a style as my friend older than myself despised the times 
before printing. The contempt would be about equally 
rational in the two cases. Yet both printing and the 



THE DEMOCRATIC CITY. 275 

electric telegraph have their use, and their political use. 
We have seen that the most important political dif- 
ference between larger and smaller states is that 
representation, which has no necessary place in the 
smaller states, has a necessarv place in the larger. 
Now comes in the main use of the invention of the 
fifteenth centuiy and the invention of the nineteenth. 
A state so small as to allow of all its citizens habitu- 
ally coming together in one place can, as far as its 
own affairs are concerned, do very well without either. 
Printing and telegraphs are at most needed for foreign 
affairs ; about domestic affairs every citizen can learn 
everything for himself without their help. I do not 
believe that printing and telegraphs would have been 
any great gain in the Athenian democracy ; I even 
believe that in some respects they would have brought 
with them a certain loss. But I believe that both those 
inventions would have been useful in the Achaian 
League, simply because all the free citizens of the Pelo- 
ponnesian cities could not habitually appear in the federal 
assembly. It would therefore have been useful for them 
to have full and speedy reports of what was done by 
those who did appear there, those who, whether they 
were formally chosen or not, were practically their repre- 
sentatives. Still all these things are merely external dif- 
ferences ; the real likenesses, the real unlikenesses, be- 
tween the political experience of one state and that of 
another lie a good deal deeper in the great facts of 
man's nature and man's history. Printing, telegraphs, 
all such like external accidents, have their use and their 
importance, but they hardly touch the root of any mat- 
ter. Both England and other parts of Europe contrived 



276 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

to do some things which are not wholly to be despised 
in days when neither printing nor telegraph was known. 
And some parts of North America contrived to do some 
things which are not wholly to be despised in days when 
printing was known, but when the telegraph was not. 
When we are tempted to despise the days of Perikles or 
Aratos as too far removed from us in accidental circum- 
stances for their political experiences to be of any use, 
it would be as well to remember that the deeds of Simon 
of Montfort were not announced to the public by the 
press, and that the deeds of Washington were not an- 
nounced by the electric telegraph. 



LECTURE III. 

Eijt Aristocratic CTttg. 

From Greece we naturally pass into Italy. In a sur- 
vey of general European history it is as much a matter 
of obvious order to give Italy the second place as it is 
to give Greece the first. So to do is simply to obey the 
laws laid upon us by the geographical position of the 
two lands. The history of Europe, the history of Aryan 
man in Europe, the history of man as a really civilized 
and political being, begins in the lands round the Med- 
iterranean, and of them it begins in the islands and pen- 
insulas of Greece. It was Greece that had to bear the 
first brunt of the struggle between East and West, 
between Asia and Europe, between despotism and free- 
dom, the struggle which, heightened and sharpened by 
the teaching of a new religion on either side, grew into 
the strife between Christendom and Islam, into the Cru- 
sades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, into the 
eternal Eastern question of our own day. It was Greece 
to whose lot it fell to lead in the way in art, in literature, 
and in philosophy, and in things better than art and litera- 
ture and philosophy, in civil justice and political freedom. 
In all these things Greece, we may say, is given unto us 
for an ensample. But it is almost wholly as an ensample 
that Greece is given to us. Of instruction in the way 
of analogy, in the way of instances from which general 

277 



278 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

principles may be inferred, no history is richer than that 
of Greece. But we can hardly say that the history of 
Greece has any great direct bearing, in the way of cause 
and effect, on the history of our own people or on that 
of any of the other nations of the modern world. The 
great chain of direct cause and effect which stretches 
on without a break to the latest events of our own day 
begins in the seven hills by the Tiber. The whole his- 
tory of the world has been determined by the geological 
fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Ti- 
ber and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one 
another than most of the other hills of Latium. On a 
site marked out above all other sites for dominion, the 
centre of Italy, the centre of Europe, as Europe then 
was, a site at the junction of three of the great nations 
of Italy, and which had the great river as its highway 
to lands beyond the bounds of Italy, stood two low hills, 
the hill which bore the name of Latin Saturn, and the 
hill at the meaning of whose name of Palatine scholars 
will perhaps guess for ever. These two hills, occupied 
by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood so near to 
one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on those 
who dwelled on them. They must either join together 
on terms closer than those which commonly united 
Italian leagues, or they must live a life of border warfare 
more ceaseless, more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of 
Italian enemies. Legend, with all likelihood, tells us 
that warfare was tried; history, with all certainty, tells 
us that the final choice was union. The two hills were 
fenced with a single wall ; the men who dwelled on them 
changed from wholly separate communities into tribes 
of a single city. Changes of the same kind took place on 



I 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 279 

not a few spots both of Greece and Italy; not a few of the 
most famous cities of both lands grew on this wise out of 
the union of earlier detached settlements. But no other 
union of the kind, not even that which called Sparta into 
being out of five villages of an older day, could compare 
in its effects on all later time with the union of those 
two small hill-fortresses into a single city. For that city 
was Rome; the hill of Saturn became the site of Rome's 
capitol, the scene of her triumphs, the home of her 
patron gods. The hill on the other side of the swampy 
dale became the dwelling-place of Rome's Caesars, and 
handed on its name of Palatium as the name for the 
homes of all the kings of the earth. Around those 
hills as a centre, Latium, Italy, Mediterranean Europe, 
were gathered in, till the world was Roman, or rather till 
the world was Rome. If Greece was given to us as an 
ensample, Rome was given to us as a mistress or rather 
as a queen. Athens might guide the nations as a 
model ; the mission of Rome was to rule them as an 
Imperial lady. Wherever we go, in Europe or in the 
lands beyond the Ocean which have been settled from 
Europe, we cannot escape from Rome, or rather wherever 
we go we carry Rome with us. What Rome has been 
in the history of the world, what Rome has been to our- 
selves and to our forefathers, I cannot better set forth 
than in words which I once addressed to another audi- 
ence. " Wherever men speak her tongue, wherever men 
revere her law, wherever men profess the faith which 
Europe and European colonies have learned of her, there 
Rome is still." 

But it is not on the great oecumenical position of 
Rome that I wish chiefly to enlarge this evening. I 



280 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

wish now rather to dwell on some other and earlier 
aspects of the Roman commonwealth, looked at more 
directly as a commonwealth, and specially as compared 
with the commonwealths of Greece. On one side of the 
Greek commonwealths I said but little, because it is a 
side of them which can really be better studied from the 
point of view of Rome. I refer to the disputes between 
orders in the same city, a side of political life on which 
the history of Rome, legendary as it is in many of its 
stages, gives us more instruction than any other history. 
And it is a side which supplies us with abundance of il- 
lustrations for the history of Switzerland and mediaeval 
Germany, with some even for the history of England. 
No city gives us so many lessons as Rome gives with 
f regard to the origin of hereditary distinctions between 
man and man. And on another side, Rome, as having 
formed a greater dominion than any other city ever 
formed, has more to tell us than any other city as to the 
various relations of alliance, dependence, and subjection, 
between one city and another. 

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the 
great commonwealth where I now find myself is the 
absence of all hereditary distinctions between one man 
and another. And I have no doubt that to many minds, 
in America and out of it, it would be thought quite 
enough explanation of the fact to say that the United 
States have a republican form of government. It seems 
to be somehow taken for granted that, wherever there 
! is a republic, that is, I imagine, where there is no hered- 
itary king, there can be no such things as nobility, aris- 
tocracy, or hereditary distinctions of any kind. Yet 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 28 1 

there have been in the history of the world such cities 
as Sparta and Corinth, as Bern and Freiburg, as Genoa 
and Lucca, as Venice and Ragusa, above all, as Rome 
herself. And I shall perhaps be thought to be setting 
forth a strange paradox, if I should say that, instead of 
a republic necessarily shutting out aristocracy, it is only 
in a republic that a true aristocracy can exist. And I 
should be thought to be putting forth a stranger para- 
dox still, if I were to say that I am inclined to bless the 
institution of peerage in England because it saved us 
from the curse of a nobility, and if I were further to add 
that I believe that it is mainly owing to the institution 
of peerage in England that there are no hereditary dis- 
tinctions in the United States. 

As it is often supposed that aristocracy and a republi- 
can form of government are inconsistent with one 
another, so it is often supposed that aristocracy neces- 
sarily implies a system of titles. Now to my paradox 
that it is only in a republic that aristocracy can exist, I 
must add the further paradox that, where titles, mere 
titles, become needful, true aristocracy has come to an 
end. Perhaps my meaning may become a little plainer 
if I tell you how, a few months back, poring about in 
a Dalmatian churchyard, I lighted on the tomb of one 
who was described as having been at one stage of his 
life, Patrician and Senator of the Republic of Ragusa, 
and at another as having been Count this or that, and 
Chamberlain to his Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic 
Majesty. Which, I would ask, of those states of life 
was the more noble, the more aristocratic ? Which 
came nearest to having a share in the rule of the best, 
the Patrician and Senator of the Republic, or the Count 



282 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

and Chamberlain of the Apostolic King? Or, I may 
ask, would Francesco Morosini have been more noble, 
more exalted in any way, if instead of the simple 
" Peloponnesiacus " upon his tomb, he could have added 
the titles of a hundred lordships and earldoms ? Would 
ought have been added to the dignity, the nobility, the 
long patrician pedigree, of Publius Cornelius Scipio and 
Quintus Fabius Maximus, if the one had been made, 
English fashion, into a Duke of Zama, and the other, 
Spanish fashion, into a Duke of Delay ? 

The proofs of my paradoxes may be found in various 
parts of the world's history. My present business is to 
deal with the light which is thrown on such matters by 
the history of the Roman commonwealth. There we 
shall see, in a strictly republican city which shuddered 
at the name of king, the long-abiding sway of a power- 
ful and exclusive aristocracy, an aristocracy whose power 
rested on immemorial legal sanctions, and which it needed 
a long constitutional struggle to overthrow. We shall 
then see the growth of a second aristocracy, almost as 
powerful, almost -as exclusive, but whose power rested 
on no legal sanction at all. We shall see, in short, as we 
may see in the earlier history of England, an immemorial 
nobility of birth give way to a new nobility of office, 
and the nobility of office again grow into a new nobility 
of birth. 

In the oldest forms of nobility, the origin of the dis- 
tinction is strictly immemorial ; there is no record of the 
way it began, no record how this and that house in a state 
came to be looked on as more noble than others. In 
the later nobility of office, the origin of the distinction 
is matter of record ; at least it will be matter of actual 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 283 

record in some cases, and matter of unavoidable infer- 
ence in others. Both these forms of nobility we see at 
Rome, and the history of Rome sets before us one very 
usual way in which the older form of nobility arose. 
The beginning of the distinction between patricians and 
plebeians at Rome is, strictly speaking, unrecorded ; but 
there can be no doubt that it was in its origin a local 
division. It was the division between the old citizens 
and the new, between the dwellers on certain of the 
hills and dales by the Tiber and the dwellers on certain 
others. Dim as is the only light which we have as to 
the early history of Rome, thus much at least we can 
see. We can easily believe that in the very beginning of 
the settlements by the Tiber, new settlers would be wel- 
come from any quarter. But, in all such cases, as soon 
as the new community felt itself strong in possession, as 
soon as its own constitution was thoroughly organized, 
as soon as local associations, local traditions, local wor- 
ships, had grown up, the tale was made up, and the 
gate was shut against new comers. The commonwealth 
now takes the form of a hereditary tribe, formed of he- 
reditary gcntes. The members of the commonwealth have 
political rights, political power, common possessions, as 
the commonwealth. The well-known Horatian quotation, 

" Privatus illis census erat brevis, 
Commune magnum ; " 

is, in these early societies, true in the most literal 
sense. Common property is the rule ; private property 
is an exception. Do not think that I am arguing 
against the institution of private property. There is 
such a thing as progress. I once asked a friend specially 



284 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

learned in early institutions and customs whether he did 
not look on private property as an innovation. He 
answered, " Yes, as man is an innovation." But as it is 
possible to look on the existence of man, however great 
an innovation, as an improvement on the state of 
things before man came into being, so private pro- 
perty, though an innovation, may still be a wholesome 
innovation. But an innovation it certainly is ; the pro- 
perty of the tribe is older than the property of the in- 
dividual. The property of the individual consists in 
the beginning of the portion of the common property 
granted by common consent to this or that man, either 
as his share in a general allotment or as the special 
reward of some service done to the community. The 
reward of Horatius is typical ; 

" They gave him of the corn-land 
That was of public right 
As much as two stout oxen 

Could plough from morn till night." 

And for a long time the aggregate of such lots and 
grants in private hands will be less than the amount 
of land still held by the community. This is a most 
important point to be borne in mind in studying the 
history of the early commonwealths ; every tribe, city, 
or the like, was, not only a body possessed of political 
rights, but a body possessed of common lands. The 
admission of new citizens to equal rights not only 
affected the exclusive political rights of the old, but, if 
they were admitted to equal rights in the common land, 
it actually lessened their property. Those who have 
watched the politics of Switzerland in later times will 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 285 

have noticed the frequent disputes with regard to the 
Niedergelassenen, those who have moved from one 
Gemeinde, Commune, or parish, to another, whether in 
their own canton or elsewhere. A man who thus 
changed from one canton to another acquired by the 
federal constitution now in force full political rights in 
the canton of his adoption. But he did not therefore 
acquire full local rights in the commune of his adoption. 
For that commune was a body of hereditary possessors, 
holding their common land by as good a right as a pri- 
vate man holds his. So we are tempted to speak; but 
historically it would be more accurate to say that the 
utmost that we can say of the private man is that he 
holds his land by as good a right as the commune holds 
theirs. In the property of the hereditary burghers of 
the commune the newly settled stranger had no share ; 
he could obtain a share only by special favour, as the 
reward of special services, or by such a payment as might 
make it worth the while of the hereditary burghers to 
admit him into their number. The questions which have 
been raised on these points are well worthy the heed of 
students of comparative politics ; they throw no small 
light on the agrarian disputes at Rome. 

Thus, we may be sure, the hills of Rome were first 
settled by separate bodies, which gradually joined 
into one political body, and formed the original Roman 
People with its original folkland or ager publicus. Three 
tribes, settlers on three hills, were the elements of which 
the original commonwealth was made. Whether there 
was anything like a nobility within the tribes themselves, 
whether certain houses had any precedence, any prefer- 
ence in the disposal of offices, we have no means of 

19 



286 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

judging. That certain houses are far more prominent 
in legend and history than others may suggest such a 
thought, but does not prove it. But one thing is certain ; 
these three tribes, these older settlers, were the original 
Roman People, which for a while numbered no members 
but themselves. They were the patres, the fathers, a 
name which in its origin meant no more than such plain 
names as goodman, housefather, and the like. In the 
Roman polity the father only could be looked on as 
a citizen in the highest sense ; his children, his grand- 
children, were in his power, from which, just like slaves, 
they could be released only by his own special act. 
Such was the origin of the name fathers, patres, patri- 
cians, a name round which such proud associations 
gathered, as the three tribes who had once been the 
whole Roman people shrank up into a special noble 
class in the midst of a new Roman people which grew 
up around them, but which they did not admit to the 
same rights as themselves. 

The incorporation of a third tribe marks the end of 
the first period of Roman history. These were the Lu- 
ceres of the Ccelian, admitted perhaps at first with rights 
not quite on a level with those of the two earlier tribes, 
the Ramnes of the Palatine, the oldest Romans of all, 
and the Tities of the Capitoline or hill of Saturn. The 
oldest Roman people was now formed. No fourth tribe 
was ever admitted ; the later tribes of Rome, it must be 
remembered, are a separate division which have nothing 
to do with these old patrician tribes. And it must have 
been a most rare favour for either individuals or whole 
houses to be received into any of the three original tribes. 
The legend of the admission of the famous Claudian 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 287 

house into the tribe of the Tities, whether we accept it 
as historical or not, at least marks such an adoption as 
possible ; it marks it also as most rare and exceptional. 
The constitution of the early commonwealth may be 
called democratic, but democratic of a type strongly 
tempered by that reverence for age and office which was 
at all times characteristic of the Roman people. It was 
democratic so far as the supreme power lay in the gen- 
eral assembly of the people, the Roman popiilus. But 
all the three elements of the ancient polity were there in 
their fulness. If there was the assembly, there was also 
the chief, taking neither the form of a hereditary mon- 
arch nor of a republican magistrate ; he was a king, but 
a king chosen for life only. And surely nowhere did 
the third element in the state, the power intermediate 
between chief and people, appear in greater dignity 
than in the shape of the Senate of Rome from its very 
first beginnings. 

Now I must ask you to take notice that there is no 
kind of inconsistency in a government being democratic 
as far as the privileged order is concerned, and oligarchic 
as far as concerns all who lie outside the privileged 
order. Take for instance the old constitution of Poland. 
When sixty thousand gentlemen on horseback came 
together to choose a king, and were required to choose 
him by an unanimous vote, it was the narrowest of 
oligarchies as regarded the rest of the nation ; but it 
was surely the wildest of democracies as regarded the 
equestrian order itself. But, what concerns us more, 
there was a point of view from which every Greek 
democracy, Athens among the foremost of them, might 
be called oligarchic. The citizens might everywhere be 



288 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

called a privileged order. If they were a privileged 
order as regarded no one else, they were a privileged 
order as regarded the slaves. But in most Greek cities, 
and specially in the great trading cities, there was a large 
class of inhabitants, personally free, but enjoying no po- 
litical rights and often only very imperfect civil rights. 
For mere residence went for nothing ; mere birth in the 
land went for nothing ; citizenship could be had only by 
descent from citizen parents or by special grant from 
the sovereign body. Some cities were more liberal of 
their citizenship than others ; sometimes a city found 
it expedient to make a large creation of citizens ; but 
nowhere did mere residence, even from generation to 
generation, of itself convey any right. The case was 
exactly analogous to the case of the Swiss Gemeinden 
of which I just spoke; it was exactly analogous to the 
case of the freemen in many English boroughs. In all 
these cases there are some common rights, there is some 
common property, which belongs exclusively to the 
privileged burghers, to which mere residence gives no 
right, but admission to which can be obtained only by 
birth or by such other means, purchase, marriage, ser- 
vitude, as the custom of the place prescribes. In all 
these cases the hereditary burghers feel no more call to 
give a share of their political rights or of their common 
property to the stranger within their gates than a private 
land-owner feels himself called on to divide his estate 
with the new comer who settles in his neighbourhood. 
Owing to the circumstances of English boroughs — owing 
in truth to the strength of the central power which hin- 
dered even the greatest English cities from being like 
the cities of Greece or of Switzerland, — in not a few Eng- 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 289 

lish towns the hereditary freemen have become an infe- 
rior and despised class. But they are none the less 
historically the representatives of the original burghers 
of the town, around whom all other classes have grown 
up. They are in truth the old citizens, the fellows of 
the Eupatridai of Athens and of the patricians of Rome. 
Now, if the privileged body of citizens is small, and 
if circumstances tend to make the settlement of non- 
privileged residents large, here is one of the means by 
which a privileged order in the narrower sense, a nobility 
in the midst of a nation or people, may arise. An order 
which takes in few or no new members tends to extinc- 
tion ; if it does not die out, it will at least sensibly 
lessen. But there is no limit to the growth of the non- 
privileged class outside. Thus the number of the old 
burghers will be daily getting smaller, the number of 
the new residents will be daily getting larger, till those 
who once formed the whole people put on step by step 
the character of an exclusive nobility in the midst of the 
extended nation which has grown up around them. By 
this time they have acquired all the attributes of nobil- 
ity, smallness of numbers, antiquity, privilege. And 
their possession of the common land — a possession 
shared constantly by a smaller number — is likely to give 
them a fourth attribute which, vulgarly at least, goes to 
swell the conception of nobility, the attribute of wealth. 
And this character of a nobility within a nation comes out 
yet more strongly if, as often happens, the non-privileged 
class is gradually admitted to some share in the rights 
of citizenship, but not to all. They may for instance re- 
ceive the civil rights, but not the political. Indeed in the 
Greek commonwealths the best definition of democracy 



29O PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

and oligarchy would be that in the democracy political 
rights are enjoyed by all who enjoy civil rights, while in 
the oligarchy political rights are confined to a part only 
of those who enjoy civil rights. Or again, the non- 
privileged class may advance a step further; it may 
obtain a share of political rights, but not their fulness. 
The new citizens may form an organized body with an 
assembly of its own, clothed with authority over its own 
members. Or they may be admitted into the general as- 
sembly of the commonwealth, but they may be refused a 
share in the public land, and may be held unqualified for 
high office. But when the excluded order has got as far 
as this, we may say that oligarchy is doomed. The great 
principle of human nature which leads him who has taken 
the inch to go on to take the ell makes it certain that, 
when such an advance as this has been made, all other 
barriers will presently be broken down. But a wise and 
moderate aristocracy, which honestly admits the rest of 
the people to civil rights, which gives them the protection 
of just laws in their private affairs while it shuts them 
out from all share in public affairs, which treats them 
personally with kindness and consideration, as its chil- 
dren rather than its subjects — such an aristocracy may 
keep its exclusive political power for ages. So it seems 
to have been at Corinth, at Rhodes, at Massalia, and 
others of the more moderate and better governed Greek 
aristocratic cities. So it was at Venice and at Ragusa, 
though at Venice at least the patricians were not a body 
of old citizens round whom an unrepresented people had 
grown, but rather a group of families which had drawn 
all power into their own hands to the exclusion of the 
rest of the people. 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 29 1 

Thus around the original people of Rome, the populus, 
the patres, the three ancient tribes, the settlers on the 
three earliest hills of Rome, arose a second people, the 
plebs. The whole history of Rome is a history of incor- 
poration. The first union between the Capitoline and 
Palatine hills was the first stage of the process which at 
last made Romans of all the nations round the Mediter- 
ranean sea. But the equal incorporation of which that 
union was the type had now ceased, not to begin again 
for ages. Whatever amount of belief we give to the 
legends of Roman wars and conquests under the kings, 
we can hardly doubt that the territory of several neigh- 
bouring towns was incorporated with the Roman state, 
and that their people, whether they removed to Rome or 
went on occupying their own lands elsewhere, became 
Romans, but not as yet full Romans. They were Romans 
in so far as they ceased to be members of any other state, 
in so far as they obeyed the laws of Rome, and served in 
the Roman armies. But they were not Romans in the 
sense of being admitted into the original Roman body ; 
they had no votes in the original Roman assembly ; they 
had no share in its public land ; they were not admissible 
to the high offices of the state. They had an organization 
of their own ; they had their own assemblies, their own 
magistrates, their own sacred rites, different in many 
things from those of the older Roman People. And we 
must remember that, throughout the Roman history, 
when any town or district was admitted to any stage, per- 
fect or imperfect, of Roman citizenship, its people were 
admitted without regard to any distinctions which had 
existed among them in their elder homes. The patricians 
of a Latin town admitted to the Roman franchise became 



292 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

plebeians at Rome. Thus, from the beginning, the Roman 
plebs contained families which, if the word " noble " has 
any real meaning, were fully as noble as any house of 
the three elder tribes. Not a few too of the plebeians 
were rich ; rich and poor, they were the more part land- 
owners ; no mistake can be greater than that which looks 
on the Roman plebs as the low multitude of a town. 
As we first see them, the truest aspect of them is that 
of a second nation within the Roman state, an inferior, a 
subject, nation, shut out from all political power, subject 
in many things to practical oppression, but which, by its 
very organization as a subject nation, was the more stirred 
up to seek, and the better enabled to obtain, full equality 
with the elder nation to which it stood side by side as a 
subject neighbour. 

Into the details of the struggle it is no part of my 
business to enter. It may be, as some stories hint, that, 
either during the time of the kings or at the time of the 
change from kings to consuls, many members of the sub- 
ject order were raised to a place among the elder tribes. 
If this be so, it marks the distinction between the old and 
the new citizens, and the inferior position of the latter, as 
firmly established. And the transfer of particular men 
or particular families from the lower rank to the higher, 
would be no gain to the lower order, but rather a loss. 
It would really be the transfer of some of their own leaders 
to the ranks of their masters. But the legislation which 
bears the name of Servius Tullius, which for several 
purposes, both military and political, united the two 
orders in a single body, marks a real, and the first, step 
in advance. Practically it did but little; but it opened the 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 293 

way for much. On the other hand, we must remember 
that the change from kings to consuls was no immediate 
gain to the subject order. Both here and in many other 
cases we must beware of being led away by the mere 
names, liberty and republic. There can be no doubt that 
the transfer of those vast powers with which Rome 
entrusted her rulers from a king chosen for life to two 
responsible magistrates chosen for a year was, in its final 
results, a great step in advance ; but it was an immediate 
loss for the excluded plebs. A king, ruling in the interest 
of the whole people, was far more likely to overlook dis- 
tinctions among his people, far more likely to shelter the 
subject order from wrong, than magistrates chosen out of 
the ruling order, chosen largely by the ruling order, and 
in no small degree chosen for the purpose of maintaining 
the exclusive dominion of that order. 

In the struggle between the two nations in the Roman 
state we see two marked stages. In the first the struggle 
is to win deliverance from actual oppression. In the 
second the object is to obtain political equality with the 
former oppressors. The great stage in the former struggle 
is when the patricians, the elder citizens, were brought 
to consent to the treaty of the Sacred Hill. This whole 
story, though it belongs to a time before the beginning 
of contemporary records, so thoroughly illustrates the 
position of the two orders that we may be sure that the 
main outline at least of the story comes from a trust- 
worthy tradition. The plebs, wearied out with oppres- 
sion, left Rome and proposed to found a new city on the 
hills beyond the Anio. The effect of this migration 
would have been to leave the patricians once more the 
whole Roman people, the only possessors of the Roman 



294 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

hills. The plebeians, naturally enough, could still bear 
the thought of ceasing to be Romans; they had found 
their Roman character more burthensome than profitable. 
But the patricians could no longer fall back on their old 
position as the only Romans. They had too long been 
the dominant order in an enlarged city to be ready to 
fall back on the time when their forefathers first sat 
down on the three hills. But we must do them the jus- 
tice to allow that their position was not wholly a selfish 
one ; if they sought their own exclusive greatness, they 
sought it only in the character of Romans. While the 
plebeians could still bear the thought of ceasing to be 
Romans, the patricians could not bear that Rome should 
be weakened by the secession of the plebeians. The 
Treaty of the Sacred Mount, the Sacred Laws, ordained 
and sworn to with all the solemnities of a treaty between 
two nations, ended this first period of strife ; but the 
distinction between the orders, as two nations in one 
city, was marked more clearly than ever. To pur- 
chase the return of the plebs, the patricians brought 
themselves to acknowledge the plebs as an order, if 
inferior to themselves, yet in some sort co-ordinate 
with themselves, to acknowledge the tribunes, the ma- 
gistrates of the plebs, as persons sacred and inviolable, to 
acknowledge their power to summon before the assem- 
bly of the plebs any man of the patricians who did any- 
thing contrary to the agreement between the orders. 
This was strictly according to the Italian law of nations ; 
but at the same time no pow r er helped more towards the 
advance of the plebs, not only by its practical use in pun- 
ishing offenders against the plebeian order, but by asserting 
the position and powers of the plebeian assembly, and 



THE ARJSTOCRA IT- 

it the place of an assembly whose 
resolves affected the whole Roman people, and not me 
beian part of it 
In all the- early disputes between the orders, the ques- 

of the as, held the fast place. 

.his matter it is not hard to throw ourselves into the 

disputants on either side. We can quite 

understand the position of the patricians. Their simple 

argument would be, " This is our land, the common land 

be original Roman people, which was theirs while 

were still strangers and enemies to Rome. It is ours ; 

leal with it as we choose ; it affair of yours how 

we deal with what is our ov 

deal with it was this. They found that it best paid their 
purpose to keep the land as a common possession of the 
order, and to allow individual patricians to occupy it as 
tenants. For the common land paid no tax; the patri- 
cian tb whose real wealth consisted in his occu- 
pation of the folkland, paid only on his small separate 
freehold, while the plebeian, all whose land was freehold, 
paid on his whole substance. Conquered land again was 
added to the patrician folkland, as the common land of 
the Roman people ; spoils went into die patrician hoard, 
as the common hoard of the Roman people, just as when 
the three patrician tribes had formed One whole Roman 
people. The patrician position therefore had become 
practically unjust, though it had about it a kind of for- 
mal justice, and though we can quite understand that the 
patricians would look on any medc 

-..-:■-. y/.:--:-.:. -.- i :■?.! -.-.*.-.:" ' " ; r: -t \:. : :. :i:t '^. 
aspect of the case was that the burthens of the state fell 
mainly on the plebeians, while the profits, as well as die 



296 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

honours, fell wholly to the patricians. The real justice 
of the case therefore lay with the plebeian argument. 
The plebs might answer : " This land is the land of the 
Roman people. You may once have been the whole 
Roman people ; but you are so no longer. We are part 
of the Roman people no less than you. The land of 
the people ought not to be turned to the private profit 
of one part of the people. Let lots of the folkland be 
booked to those citizens who have no land, and let the 
rest be applied to the public purposes of the state, and 
not to the enrichment of particular persons." This is one 
of a thousand cases in which formal and substantial 
justice are thoroughly opposed, but in which the plea 
of merely formal justice is at least plausible, and where 
it may be, and doubtless was, urged with perfect good 
faith. The exclusive patrician occupation of the folkland 
was not an usurpation or an innovation ; the patricians, 
the old citizens, had taken nothing from the plebeians, 
the new citizens ; they simply refused to share something 
with them. What they refused to share was formally 
their own, and had once been rightly their own. Things 
had so changed that their exclusive possession was no 
longer just; but it was not likely that they would be 
quick to see that it was no longer just. And the change 
had been gradual. As the plebeians became more and 
more an essential part of the Roman people, it became 
more and more clearly unjust that the public land should 
be turned to the profit of one part of the people only. 
But no one could have pointed out the particular 
moment when the exclusive patrician possession first 
became an unjust thing. Questions of the same kind 
have often been raised in other times and places^ and 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 297 

they may teach us to deal tenderly both with individuals 
and with whole orders who cleave to antiquated rights, 
which once were just, but which have ceased to be just. 
Their case must never be confounded with mere usur- 
pations, fraudulent or forcible. It may be needful to 
withstand both alike, but the two are to be withstood 
with very different feelings towards the adversary. 
There is no baseness in a man or a class of men cleav- 
ing to rights and possessions which they honestly hold 
to be their own, which in a sense are their own,, even 
though it may, for the public good, be needful that they 
should be their own no longer. The dissensions between 
the Roman orders are on the whole honourable to both 
parties. It is possible to understand both sides, to enter 
into the feelings of both sides. To the plebeian order 
the strife is specially honourable. On the plebeian side 
there seems to have been no violence at all. On the pa- 
trician side there was some ; but certainly less than in 
many other commonwealths in the like case. In many 
Greek cities each order often sought, and sometimes 
wrought, the utter destruction of the other. The 
commons strove to slay or drive out the nobles, and 
to keep the city wholly for themselves. The nobles 
strove to slay or drive out the commons, and to keep 
the city for themselves, with their slaves and imme- 
diate dependents. There is no sign of this kind 
of feeling on either side at Rome. The patricians 
seek to keep the plebs in subjection ; but, as the story 
of the Sacred Mount shows, as every story of secession 
goes, they had no wish to get rid of them. The ple- 
beians strive to win perfect equality with the patricians ; 
but they are ready to leave to the patricians equal rights 



298 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

with themselves. They do not seek, like the commons 
in many a city of mediaeval Italy, to deprive them of 
political rights, but only of exclusive political rights. 
Still less was there, as there often was in the Greek 
cities, any cry for the slaughter or banishment of the 
dominant order, or for a general confiscation of their 
lands or goods. In demanding that the exclusive 
patrician possession of the folkland should come to 
an end, the plebeian argument was simply that the folk- 
land was the general property of the Roman people, 
not the exclusive property of the patrician order, now 
that they had become only a part of the Roman people. 
The true position of the Roman plebs y and the nature 
of the strife which they waged, come out in a striking 
way in one of the few moments of the strife which is not 
honourable to them. In the decisive struggle over the 
laws of Licinius and Sextius there was for moment a 
division in the plebeian ranks. Three measures of reform 
were proposed ; one to settle the grievances of the debt- 
ors ; another, an agrarian law to restrict the occupation 
of the folkland ; a third, which decreed that one of the 
two consuls should always be a plebeian. The patri- 
cians had brought themselves to consent to the first two 
measures, which touched only their pockets ; they stood 
out against the third, which touched their pride and their 
political monopoly. And the great mass of the plebs were 
ready to agree to this compromise. The measures about 
the debts and the folkland concerned the general mass ; 
they were measures which removed practical grievances 
which touched every man; but the proposal to have 
plebeian consuls concerned, it might be argued, only 
Licinius and Sextius themselves and the other leading 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 299 

men of their order, who had a chance of being chosen 
consuls. This somewhat base fit lasted only for a 
moment. Licinius, with his homely proverb, that they 
must eat if they would drink, insists that his three 
bills shall all stand or fall together; the mass of the 
plebs stands by him, and plebeian equality is won. 
The story illustrates a general weakness of human 
nature ; but it also shows us that jealousies had al- 
ready begun to spring up between the mass of the 
plebeian order and its untitled and unprivileged, but 
essentially noble, leaders. These last were, in all but 
political privilege, the equals of the patricians. Since 
the Canuleian law, which legitimated marriages between 
the two orders, they must have been on a level of social 
equality with them. There is at this moment no exact 
parallel in the modern world to the distinctions of pa- 
trician and plebeian at this time; though it is well to 
remember that, at the beginning of this century, several 
exact parallels still survived in the aristocratic common- 
wealths of Europe. But a general idea of the true posi- 
tion of Licinius may be gained if we conceive a wealthy 
and long-descended English baronet or esquire, married 
possibly to the daughter of an earl or duke, as Licinius 
was married to a Fabia, withstanding some exclusive 
pretension of the House of Lords. Such an one is a 
commoner, with no legal privilege over the humblest 
commoner. But in many things he has much more in 
common with those whom he opposes than with those 
whom he represents. The comparison is not exact; 
but it comes much nearer to the truth of the case than 
the old delusion which painted Licinius and Sextius as 
vulgar leaders of a mere mob. 



300 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

And the thing to be noticed is that this jealousy on 
the part of the humbler plebeians, unjust as it certainly 
was at the time, was fully justified by the facts of his- 
tory. The class of plebeians of whom Licinius was the 
type, did in the end practically go over to the patricians. 
They and the remnant of the patricians did in the end 
form a nobility whose position was purely conventional, 
which had no legal privilege of any kind, but which was 
practically as exclusive as the old nobility of the patri- 
cians. Still the passing of the Licinian laws was none 
the less one of the greatest steps in the history of Rome 
and in the history of the world. The effects of the 
winning of plebeian equality are shown in the two 
great centuries which followed, in the slow advance of 
Rome while she was still weakened by dissensions at 
home, as compared with her speedy march to greatness 
as soon as worn-out distinctions were removed, as soon 
as the commonwealth was united and was able to put 
forth its full strength. The Licinian laws, formally only 
one step, were practically the winning of the victoiy. 
They laid down a principle which was carried out bit by 
bit, but which, when it was once laid down, could not fail 
to be carried out bit by bit. By the Licinian laws them- 
selves only a single office was immediately opened to 
plebeians. But when one of the two consuls, the direct 
successors of the ancient kings, was of necessity a ple- 
beian, other offices could not be kept as an exclusively 
patrician possession. But it was characteristic of Rome, 
and one of the points of likeness between Rome and 
England, that there was no one general act wiping out 
all distinctions between patrician and plebeian. Every 
office of any political importance, first the civil, then the 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 3OI 

religious offices, was thrown open to the commons. But 
they were thrown open one by one, and some offices of 
great dignity but of no political importance were never 
thrown open at all. Pontiffs and augurs, in themselves 
religious officers, had indirect political powers ; their 
posts therefore were thrown open to plebeian holders. 
But the flamens of the chief gods held an office, sacred 
and venerable indeed, but of no importance in temporal 
affairs ; no one therefore ever troubled himself to throw 
open their office to plebeians, and the chief flamens 
remained to the end purely patrician. So with the in- 
tersex, the occasional magistrate whose existence of 
itself proves that Rome once had kings. An interreg- 
num came so seldom that no one thought of proposing 
a bill to allow a plebeian intersex, and that office too 
remained purely patrician. On the other hand, the 
tribunes of the plebs, once the defenders of the plebs 
against the patricians, had now become, so far as their 
office kept any useful functions, defenders of the whole 
people against any wrong on the part of the Senate 
or magistrates. But they still remained exclusively ple- 
beian. A patrician could not be tribune at Rome, any 
more than a peer can be Chancellor of the Exchequer in 
England. When we remember the great powers of the 
tribune's office, when we further remember that both 
consuls might be plebeians, while both could not be 
patricians, we might be inclined to say that the tables 
were turned, that plebeians had the upper hand, and 
that, to make all citizens equal, a Licinian law the other 
way was needed. 

But practically it was not so. By the time of the 
second civil struggles of Rome, struggles so unlike 
20 



302 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

the elder struggles of patricians and plebeians, so im- 
measurably more violent and bloody, the patriciate had 
practically gone out of memory. The few occasions on 
which a distinction was drawn between the orders, were, 
with the single exception of the tribuneship, mere curious 
survivals. But the new nobility which had arisen gradually 
became as exclusive in feeling as the old. This new nobil- 
ity took in all plebeians whose forefathers had held any of 
the great offices of the state. It was thus a nobility of of- 
fice growing into a new nobility of birth. It differed from 
the old patriciate in having no legal privilege. Proud and 
exclusive as it became, it existed wholly by sufferance. 
The nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, despised the 
new man whose family could show no images of consuls 
and praetors ; but they could not, as the patricians had 
once done toward the plebeians, say that the election of 
such an one was contrary to the law of the common- 
wealth and the will of the gods. The noble plebeian 
Metellus deemed it as monstrous for the ignoble plebeian 
Marius to aspire to the consulship as any Appius Clau- 
dius of old could have deemed it for a forefather of 
Metellus to do the like. But Appius Claudius had at 
least the letter of the law on his side. It needed the 
enactment of the Licinian laws to enable a Metellus to 
be consul. To make a Marius consul nothing was 
needed but a will on the part of the people firm enough 
to bear down all opposition to a course which might 
seem strange, but which was perfectly legal. 

The Roman history thus enables us to see, in the 
course of the history of one commonwealth, two of the 
ways in which a noble class is formed. There is a re- 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 303 

markable parallel in the history of England and of some 
other Teutonic lands. In these also a newer nobility 
of office supplanted an older nobility of birth. Only in 
this case the older nobility is strictly immemorial, which 
we cannot say that the Roman patriciate was. Teu- 
tonic sagas set before us the three classes of mankind 
— the eorl or noble, the ceorl or simple freeman, and the 
thrall or slave — as brought into being by three separate 
acts of creation on the part of the gods. That is to say, 
the distinction was immemorial ; we cannot explain it 
with anything like the same likelihood with which we 
can explain the origin of the Roman patriciate. We 
must simply accept the distinction as being as old as the 
earliest glimpses that we get of our own forefathers. 
Nor can we even see in what the privileges of this 
immemorial nobility consisted, whether it strictly had 
any privilege at all, or whether its nobility consisted 
simply in that reverence for ancient and illustrious 
descent which has often been a powerful agent even in 
societies which politically were purely democratic. So 
it was at Athens, where men of old Eupatrid family were 
long preferred for the great offices of the state ; so it 
was in Uri and Glarus, where the chief magistrate was 
chosen year after year from certain great and respected 
houses. But at Athens, as at Rome, the nobility of the 
Eupatrids was that of old citizens ; in the Swabian lands 
the origin of the great houses is part of the question of 
the general origin of the later Teutonic nobility, the 
very question which we have now reached. That nobil- 
ity arose, largely at least, out of personal service to the 
king. As kings grew in power and dignity, their imme- 
diate following, their comitates, their thegns, grew along 



304 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

with them. They came to form a nobility of office, as 
distinguished from the older nobility of birth. This 
answers singularly to the later nobility of Rome, with 
the single difference which necessarily arises out of the 
difference of political constitution. In the one case it is 
office bestowed by the king : in the other case it is office 
bestowed by the people. But in either case we can distinct- 
ly see whence the nobility comes. It is a not an immemo- 
rial nobility, as to whose origin we can say nothing. And, 
again, it is not, like the old patriciate, a nobility which 
cannot receive any increase of members, or can at most re 
ceive them by an act of its own. When nobility depends 
on office bestowed by the king, it is plain that the king 
can ennoble ; so at Rome, where nobility depended on 
office bestowed by the people, it would not be too much 
to say that the people could ennoble. I am here brought 
round to my former paradox, that it is only in a republic 
that a real aristocracy can exist. Aristocracy is the rule 
of the best. We will not dispute about the standard of 
best. If it were the morally best, then aristocracy, in 
that sense, would be the ideal form of government ; only 
unluckily no such aristocracy ever existed. We must 
put up with some of the substitutes for the morally best. 
And there is one such substitute which is well worth 
some study. In old and well-ordered aristocratic com- 
monwealths, as Venice, Bern, Ragusa, hereditary posses- 
sion of power, early training for its exercise, does really 
seem to call into being a certain hereditary capacity for 
government, which does make the rule of such a body, 
in a certain secondary sense, a rule of the best. I need 
not, least of all in this land, stop to point out the faults 
of such a form of government : what I wish to point out 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 305 

is that it has some merits. But what is more important 
is that no other form of government has so good a claim 
to the name of aristocracy. A body of men who, in a 
certain secondary sense, may be called the best, do rule. 
They really rule, and they rule of themselves ; no exter- 
nal power can thrust new members into their order ; if 
any such are ever admitted, it must be by the act of the 
order itself. It is plain that such an aristocracy as this 
can exist only in a commonwealth ; it is inconsistent 
with the presence of a king. In a kingdom there may 
be an aristocratic element in the constitution ; there can 
be no aristocracy in the strict sense. The old nobility 
of France, with all its pride and exclusiveness, was in no 
sense an aristocracy. The French nobles were in no 
sense the best, and they did not rule. The oppressors 
of the people were the slaves of the king. They sought 
to be marked out by titles of his bestowing. Yet in 
that large body of French nobility which was privileged 
but untitled, we see another sign that nobility does not, ' 
as is often vulgarly thought, need titles or depend upon 
them. 

In England things in the end took a course quite 
unlike anything that ever happened elsewhere. The 
British peerage is something unique in the world. In 
England there is, strictly speaking, no nobility. This 
saying may indeed sound like a paradox. The English 
nobility, the British aristocracy, are phrases which are in 
everybody's mouth. Yet, in strictness, there is no such \ 
thing as an aristocracy or a nobility in England. There 
is undoubtedly an aristocratic element in the English 
constitution; the House of Lords is that aristocratic 
element. And there have been times in English history 



306 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

when there has been a strong tendency to aristocracy, 
when the lords have been stronger than either the king 
or the people. And it is not to be denied that some of 
the lordly families of England have shown from genera- 
tion to generation all the higher qualities of an aristo- 
cracy, among them that hereditary capacity for govern- 
ment which we see at Rome and at Venice. But a real 
aristocracy, like that of Venice, an aristocracy not only 
stronger than either king or people, but which had 
driven out both king and people, an aristocracy from 
whose ranks no man can come down and into whose 
ranks no man can rise save by the act of the privileged 
body itself, — such an aristocracy as this England has 
never seen. Nor has England ever seen a nobility in 
the true sense, the sense which the word bears in every 
continental land, a body into which men may be raised 
by the king, but from which no man may come down, 
a body which hands on to all its members, to the lat- 
est generations, some kind of privilege or distinction, 
whether its privileges consist in substantial political 
power, or in bare titles and precedence. In England 
there is no nobility. The so-called noble family is not 
noble in the continental sense ; privilege does not go 
on from generation to generation; titles and prece- 
dence are lost in the second or third generation ; sub- 
stantial privilege exists in only one member of the fam- 
ily at a time. The powers and privileges of the peer 
himself are many ; but they belong to himself only ; his 
children are legally commoners ; his grandchildren are 
in most cases undistinguishable from other commoners. 
The remotest descendant of a continental noble keeps 
all the privileges of nobility ; the remote descendant 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 307 

of an English peer has no privilege beyond his faint 
chance of succeeding to the peerage ; till he succeeds, 
he differs in nothing from another man. The English 
peerage, if we must call it a nobility at all, is a nobility 
so exclusive that it shuts out from its privileges even its 
own children, even those who will or may be some day 
be peers themselves. In other words, it is not a nobility 
at all. A certain great position in the state is hereditary ; 
but nobility in the strict sense there is none. The actual 
holder of the peerage has, as it were, drawn to his own 
person the whole nobility of the family. His position is 
so great that it allows of nothing, that can be even the 
shadow of itself. The only distinction that the law of 
England knows is the distinction between peer and 
commoner — commoner being a name which takes in 
even the eldest son of the peer, even the younger 
children of the king, if they are not specially raised to 
the peerage. Any distinctions below that of the peer- 
age convey no legal privilege. Gentilhovime in France 
was the name of a well-defined and privileged class : gen- 
tleman in England means whatever meaning we choose 
to put upon the word ; it assuredly does not mean a 
defined class fenced in by legal privileges. Strictly it 
means one who has a real right to bear coat-armour; 
but the bearer of coat-armour by the best of rights has 
no advantage in the eye of the law. To me at least it 
seems that it is the extraordinary greatness of the peer- 
age, gathering together all nobility in itself, which has 
hindered the existence in England of any privileged 
class answering to the nobility of continental lands. 
Where even the children of the peer were unprivileged, 
no lower class could assert any exclusive claim. The 



308 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

peerage has its faults; but I am far less inclined to 
curse it for its faults than to bless it for having saved 
England from a far greater curse. It is because England 
has a peerage that she has no nobility. 

My paradox then, I think, is made out. It is the 
existence of the English peerage which has made class 
distinctions impossible in the American commonwealth. 
They were impossible in the colony, because they had 
no existence in the mother- country, except in a form 
which no man thought of transferring to the colony. 
In Old England all men under the rank of peerage were 
legally equal. There was no peerage in New England ; 
therefore all men in New England were legally equal. 
But if the growth of a real nobility in England had 
not been hindered by the existence of peerage, if there 
had grown up in England a real nobility like the conti- 
nental nobility, such a nobility as that might easily have 
been transplanted to the colonies. A gentleman in the 
foreign sense would not have ceased to be a gentleman 
by crossing the Ocean, Not a few of the colonists were 
gentlemen of England in every sense of the word, and 
assuredly they did not cease to be gentlemen of Eng- 
land by crossing the Ocean. But then their position 
as gentlemen gave them no legal privilege. The social 
condition of different colonies differed ; the gentleman, 
as such, might be of more account in one colony than 
another ; the town's meeting might be more prominent 
in one, the lord and his manor in another. But a class 
fenced in by hereditary privileges known to the law was 
not, and could not be, formed anywhere. Men could 
not bring with them to the new land distinctions which 



THE ARISTOCRATIC CITY. 309 

did not exist in their old land. The one distinction which 
did exist in their own land, the distinction of peerage, 
they did not bring ; they hardly could have brought it. 
And they had no other distinction to bring. If then in 
America there has never been any really privileged class 
to be brought down to the level of its fellows, you may 
for that, in quite a new sense of a well-known saying, 
" thank God there is a House of Lords." 

No one, I trust, will infer from anything that I have 
said this evening that the two ways of which I have 
spoken are the only ways in which distinctions of rank 
have grown up. The nobility of office and what I may 
perhaps call the nobility of elder settlement, such as that 
of the Roman patriciate, are only two ways out of many 
in which certain families have risen to hereditary pre- 
eminence over their fellows. I have simply chosen 
Rome as illustrating two of the most remarkable forms 
which the process has taken. I have hinted at other 
forms, as in the great case of Venice. It would be an 
useful exercise to trace out the various ways in which 
nobility has grown up, distinguishing the civic nobility, 
the patriciate of a free city, from the scattered nobility 
of a kingdom or other large territory. It is in the civic 
nobility only that the true aristocracy or any near ap- 
proach to it can exist. Exclusive as it is, it may, among 
the privileged class, be a school of republican virtue, 
hardly less than the democracy. It is essentially legal 
and orderly, and towards subject towns and districts its 
rule has often been found less harsh than that of a ruling 
democracy. Far be it from me to defend any exclusive 
system ; but it may be well to remember even the better 



310 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

side of a kind of polity which just now seems the most 
impossible of any, but which flourished in several illus- 
trious cities even within living memory. Where the old 
patrician street of Bern looks forth upon her subject 
mountains, where the palaces of Venice rise as by magic 
from her waters, where the less famous but not less love- 
ly palace of enslaved Ragusa still groans under the rule 
of the oppressor whom Venice has cast forth, even a con- 
vinced votary of popular rights may be allowed to look 
back for a moment to the fallen glories of those old patri- 
ciates. Bern and Venice are free ; Ragusa still wears 
the chain, and when we see her under the yoke of the 
stranger, we may be tempted to look only on the 
brighter side of days when her masters were at least 
her countrymen. But Bern, Venice, Ragusa, what are 
they all but children of Rome? It is from the Eternal 
City that we set forth, and it is with the Eternal City 
that we must carry on our tale. 



LECTURE IV. 

&l)t liultng mtn antr its 3Smpto. 

In our last lecture we spoke of Rome, but we spoke of 
Rome mainly with regard to her internal state ; we spoke 
of Rome as a city, as the city from whose history we may 
learn more than from any other history as to the origin, 
the growth, the dying out, the rising up again, of dis- 
tinctions of orders in the same commonwealth. But this 
is only one side of Rome, and, in the general history of 
the world, it is not the most important side. The com- 
monwealth of Rome gave way to the Empire of Rome. 
That change may be looked at in two lights. From the 
point of view of the local Roman city, it was a change 
from a commonwealth to a practical monarchy — I say 
a practical monarchy, for it must ever be borne in mind 
that the Roman Empire did not put on any of the outward 
forms of a monarchy till it had been in being for three cen- 
turies. But the change brought with it whatever conse- 
quences are implied in the change from a commonwealth 
to a monarchy, remembering the special circumstances 
and position of that particular commonwealth and of 
the monarchy into which it changed. At the moment, 
even a republican on principle, even a citizen of the Athe- 
nian democracy, might have allowed that the change 
from the anarchy of the civil wars to the mild rule of 
Augustus was a change for the better. But then, look- 

311 



312 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

ing at the Roman city only, it may be that the evils of 
the commonwealth could have been reformed in some 
other way, and it must be borne in mind that it was the 
rule of Augustus which made the rule of Caius and 
Nero possible. It is from the wider view of general 
history that the great change in the Roman government 
puts on another look. If we look beyond the Roman 
city and those who anywhere enjoyed its franchise 
to the vast range of the lands which formed the 
dominion of the Roman city, then we must look on 
the change from the commonwealth to the Empire 
with other eyes. As things stood, if the Roman 
dominion was to be kept together, it could be kept 
together only by the sacrifice of the freedom of the 
Roman city. " Imperium et libertas " were, as usual, 
found to be things which it is not easy to reconcile. 
The Romans boasted that they were lords of the world ; 
they found that they could not remain lords of the 
world, except by making one of their own number a 
lord over themselves. From such a choice as this two 
questions arise : Was the Roman dominion a thing 
which it was wise and right to maintain ? Secondly, 
How came it about that there was no means of main- 
taining it, except by setting aside the free constitution 
of the Roman city ? 

Of these questions we will look to the second first. 
The Roman dominion is the central fact in the history 
of the world. This is a truth on which I have in all 
times and in all places striven to insist. Rome is the 
lake in which all the streams of older history lose them- 
selves, and out of which all the streams of later history 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 313 

flow. To estimate the good or evil of the Roman 
dominion in the general history of the world, we must 
look both forwards and backwards. We must look, not 
only to those things to which the Roman dominion put 
an end, but to those things also to which the Roman 
dominion gave the chance of beginning. But we have 
not yet reached the stage of looking forwards. At this 
point we must take the Roman dominion as a fact, as a 
colourless fact; we will draw our moral afterwards. We 
have now to see how that dominion came about, and 
why its existence necessarily involved the change from 
the commonwealth to the Empire. 

The dominion of Rome grew up as the greatest 
example of the dominion of a ruling city which the 
world has ever seen. In her character as a ruling city 
Rome is not solitary; there have been many such before 
and since. Indeed, we might say that the disposition to 
try to reconcile the two incompatible things, to enjoy at 
once " imperium et libertas," is so strong in mankind 
that every city that has had the chance has been a rul- 
ing city. That is to say, every city that has been able 
so to do has kept some other city or people out of the 
enjoyment of the freedom which it claims and cherishes 
for itself. But mark that this is more excusable in the 
city than in any other form of political community. A 
district or land, whether kingdom or commonwealth, if 
it extends its borders, can with perfect ease admit the 
inhabitants of the new territory to equal rights. This 
is less easy on the part of a city ; for a city has a com- 
pact local being which can hardly be in this way indefi- 
nitely enlarged. Distinct cities, standing quite apart 
from one another, may be enemies, allies, confederates ; 



3 14 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

they may be ruling city and subject city ; but they can 
hardly be merged into a single city. Yet some of the 
older cities, before they began their career of dominion 
strictly so called, went through a stage of incorporation. 
We have seen that several Greek cities arose from the 
incorporation of older villages or small towns standing 
near together. Incorporation was carried as far as it 
could be carried under the ancient system of city* com- 
munities, when the Athenian franchise was extended to 
the freemen of all the Attic towns. But when in later 
times Athens found herself at the head of a confederacy 
of distant and many of them insular cities, her headship 
gradually changed into dominion. Incorporation was im- 
possible; representation, though possible, had not occur- 
red to men's minds; federation, though both possible and 
existing, had never been tried on such a scale. Athens 
became, hardly of set purpose, a ruling city ; but, when 
she became aware of the fact, she had no mind to part 
with the dominion which she had won. So it was with 
other cities, Sparta, Thebes, Olynthos ; so beyond the 
Greek world with Carthage ; so it was in later times with 
a crowd of German, Italian, Burgundian, and other cities, 
among which Venice by sea and Bern by land stand out 
conspicuous. The scattered dominions of Venice formed 
a power which ranked with great kingdoms ; Genoa, in 
times which seem almost recent, bore rule over Corsica ; 
it was only because the ruling city handed over its rights 
to a neighbouring king that Napoleone Buonaparte was 
not born either a free Corsican or a Genoese subject. 
All these, and crowds of others, are strictly cases of 
ruling cities. The city, whether aristocratic or demo- 
cratic at home, was a corporate sovereign abroad, The 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 315 

subject lands and towns might be in various degrees of 
subjection ; they might be absolute bondmen, or they 
might keep full local freedom ; they might be ruled by 
magistrates of their own chosing or by governors sent 
by the ruling city ; but in any case they were subject so 
far as this, that questions of peace and war, and all that 
concerns peace and war, were settled for them by the 
ruling city without their having any part or lot in the 
matter. 

But at the head of all these cities stands Rome, the 
greatest of incorporating cities, the greatest of ruling 
cities. Athens extended her citizenship over all Attica ; 
she extended her dominion over the greater part of the 
^Egaean coasts and islands, and over some points beyond. 
But Rome first extended her citizenship over all Italy, and 
her dominion over the whole Mediterranean world, and 
then, by another stage, she made her citizenship coexten- 
sive with her dominion. Some steps of her incorporating 
process we have already followed. We have seen " the 
great group of village-communities by the Tiber " first 
form itself into a single city by the union of the detached 
settlements on the seven hills. We have next seen it 
incorporate not a few of the neighbouring towns and dis- 
tricts, and admit their people to an imperfect citizenship. 
We have seen the men who were thus admitted to an im- 
perfect citizenship win their way step by step to full equal- 
ity with the elder burghers. By these means Rome grew 
to the foremost place, first in Latium, then in Italy. 
There can be little doubt that Rome was, almost from 
the beginning, the foremost of Latin cities. These last, 
a fluctuating league of thirty towns, were, one by one, 
immeasureably less than Rome. And, more than this, 



316 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

they belonged to an earlier stage in the growth of man- 
kind than Rome did. Not a few of them were towns 
of the very earliest type, forts on the tops of lofty 
hills, away from the sea, away from any river, seeking 
safety by isolating themselves from their neighbours on 
sites which were deemed impregnable. Rome, on her 
low hills by the great river, keeping the mouth of the 
great river with her haven, belongs to a far later stage 
of progress. Tusculum, on her mountain-top, could be 
no real rival to the mistress of the Tiber. Rome had a 
seeming rival in Etruscan Veii, a city physically as great 
as herself, and enriched doubtless with far more of 
wealth and culture. But Veii was only a seeming rival ; 
away from the sea, away from the Tiber, she might 
check the course of Rome, but she could never herself 
hold the place which was Rome's destiny. The dif- 
ference between Rome and any other Latin city appears 
at once in the fact that Rome by herself always deals on at 
least equal terms with the Latin league as a whole. There 
seems no reason to doubt that Rome, in the days of her 
kings, had won a federal headship over all Latium, and 
that she lost that headship through her change from 
kings to consuls. She then won back something more 
than federal headship over all Latium by the gradual 
working of various and even conflicting causes. The 
pressure of the iEquians and Volscians drove, first the 
Latins, alike of the hills and of the coast, and then the 
stout hill-folk of the Hernicans, to join with Rome in a 
triple alliance. In that alliance Rome, the single city, 
held, even in form, an equal place with the two leagues, 
and she gradually grew into their chief. As in the 
early history of England Wessex grew by the invasions 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 317 

of the Danes, so Rome grew by the attacks of the 
yEquians and Volscians. In each case the power which 
was in the end to be the ruling power had to go through 
a heavy struggle, and to be sometimes brought to the 
brink of overthrow ; but the main stress of the war fell 
on the allied and subject states, by whose misfortunes 
the ruling power gained in the end. The allied leagues 
were broken up : Rome stood forth more distinctly than 
ever as the one great city amidst a crowd of allies and 
enemies, none of whom singly could compare with her. 
The great Latin war, the war in which the first Decius 
gave himself for Rome, marks the last struggle of 
Rome's irnmedmte kinsfolk against her ascendency. 
The Latin cities, the other cities of Rome's immediate 
neighbourhood, receive whatever doom Rome thought 
good. In the end we may say that all gradually rose, 
often through the intermediate stage of the imperfect 
franchise specially known as Latin, to the full citizen- 
ship of Rome. 

The five-and-thirty tribes of Rome, the tribes of the 
Roman commons as distinguished from the three ancient 
patrician tribes which were now well nigh forgotten, 
mark the extreme point of incorporation of this kind. 
The territory to whose free population Roman citizen- 
ship was now extended was of very unusual size accord- 
ing to the measure of ancient cities. We must remember 
that the franchise to which they were admitted was the 
local franchise of the Roman city ; their votes at elec- 
tions and in the passing of laws could be given nowhere 
but in the Roman city. Just as in the case of the 
Achaian cities, the votes in the Roman assembly were 
taken, not by heads but by tribes. In no other way 
21 



318 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

could the distant tribes have kept any voting power at 
all ; they would have been swamped by the four tribes 
of the city. The Roman territory was now far too large 
for all citizens to appear habitually in their own persons ; 
and it may be, as some scholars have thought, that those 
who appeared at Rome and gave the vote of a distant 
tribe were practically the representatives of their neigh- 
bours who stayed at home. Be this as it may, formal 
representation was unknown ; the citizen who wished to 
take any share in public affairs could do so only by 
going to Rome and giving his vote in person. It was 
the city of Rome thus formed, with- its vast citizen popu- 
lation spread over a large district, a population which 
more and more put on the character of a privileged race 
among the gradually descending ranks of Latins, Ital- 
ians, and provincials, which became mistress of Italy 
and of the Mediterranean world. 

The Latin franchise, a franchise not confined to the 
old Latium, but which belonged to not a few of the 
colonies which Rome planted, was, either for an individ- 
ual or a community, a step to the full Roman franchise. 
The citizen of a Latin town could, under certain defined 
circumstances, specially by holding certain magistracies 
in his own town, claim Roman citizenship of right. 
This marks the Latin communities as children of Rome, 
as distinguished from Italians and provincials, both of 
whom were strictly subject, though in very different 
degrees of subjection. Rome, already the head of La- 
tium, went on to the headship of Italy. Step by step, 
all the Italian towns and leagues, Samnite, Etruscan, 
Greek, or any other, became allies of Rome. But the 
days of incorporation were now past. Alliance now 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 319 

meant subjection ; but it was the subjection of one com- 
monwealth to another. The old political communities 
of Italy lived on as political communities, bound to 
follow the lead of Rome in war and peace, liable to 
interference whenever the policy of Rome dictated inter- 
ference, but still keeping their being as separate though 
dependent commonwealths, with their own laws, magis- 
trates, and assemblies, controlled from time to time 
by orders from the Roman Senate, but not held down 
by the constant presence of a Roman governor. In this 
case the greater part of Italy remained for two hundred 
years. A galling position it must have been, above all 
to the leading men in each commonwealth. The Italians 
had lost the old freedom of their several towns and 
leagues, with very little chance of admission to the citi- 
zenship of the city which ruled over all. The Etruscan 
Lucumo, the Samnite Imperator, the natural equal of the 
proudest Roman patrician, counted at Rome for less than 
an emancipated slave. Still the Italian towns remained 
commonwealths, though dependent commonwealths; 
they kept all those powers of separate commonwealths 
which the ruling city did not deem it for her interest to 
keep to herself. 

In the next stage Rome, already the head of Italy, 
advances to be the head of the Mediterranean world. 
The territory which she acquired out of Italy she made 
into provinces. Now the word province, in any accurate 
use of language, implies dependence ; there is no greater 
vulgarism than when the word is applied, commonly 
contemptuously applied, to the whole mass of any 
kingdom or country, in opposition to its biggest town. 
When a whole country enjoys equal rights, no part 



320 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of it can strictly be called a province. But the word 
provincial was, with a near approach to accuracy, often 
applied to your Thirteen Colonies, while they were 
still dependencies of Great Britain, and not free and 
independent states. It was, with strict accuracy, ap- 
plied to the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, 
lands which were not only dependencies, but were con- 
quered from another power. So in the new-fangled 
Empire of India there are provinces, conquered and 
subject lands, dependent on the absolute will of a 
distant power. But in Great Britain there are no pro- 
vinces, for every spot of the land has equal rights with 
every other. Little Peddlington is no more provincial 
than London. Still less is there any room for provinces 
in your federal system. A province, in the Roman sy- 
stem, was a subject land, a land beyond the bounds of 
Italy, a land of which the Roman People was the cor- 
porate sovereign. Indeed the soil itself was strictly the 
property of the Roman People ; the provincials held it 
only on such terms and by such payments as the Roman 
people thought good. The corporate sovereign " was 
represented in the subject land by a governor, proconsul, 
propraetor, or other, armed with powers pretty well des- 
potic, responsible in theory for his acts, but a suit against 
whom was seldom successful, because it was tried before 
judges whose interest it was to screen him. Thus among 
those inhabitants of the Roman dominion who were 
personally free, there were four classes, ranged in an 
ascending scale — provincials, Italians, Latins, Romans. 
For any one of these to be raised to the rank next above 
his own was in its measure promotion. And we must 
bear in mind that, within any territory which appears on 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 32 1 

the map as a Roman province, there was a wide differ- 
ence of political conditions; all that appears geographi- 
cally as the province was not in the provincial condition. 
Particular families, particular cities and districts, might 
have been raised to the Italian, the Latin, or even the 
full Roman, franchise. Or again, some cities might never 
have been brought into the provincial relation at all. Not 
a few cities remained till a wonderfully late time nomi- 
nally free, geographically included within the Roman do- 
minions, but in theory independent allies of the Roman 
people. Such cities kept on all the forms of the old free 
commonwealths, which seem to have in many cases died 
out gradually without any moment of formal abolition. 
Such a city was Athens, for ages in theory an ally, not 
a subject, of Rome, a confederate commonwealth, of 
which one year Hadrian was archon and another year 
Constantine was general. And even the strictly subject 
cities kept up their old forms, their old magistracies, 
though they had sunk from free commonwealths to 
municipalities or something less. If we are to name a 
day when the cities of Greece lost their last traces of in- 
dependence, we can name no day earlier than the reign 
of Justinian. 

Now all these distinctions are of great importance 
and interest ; they illustrate the kind of way in which 
a city bears rule over other cities, cities standing to it in 
endless different relations of alliance, dependence, and 
absolute subjection. We shall presently see exactly the 
same kind of relations in the case of other ruling cities ; 
Rome simply does on a gigantic scale what other cities 
before and after did in their measure. But for that rea- 
son Rome is the type ; it is the grandest developement 



322 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of tendencies which Athens and Carthage, Bern and 
Venice, carried out as far as they could, but which they 
had not the opportunity of carrying out to the same 
extent as Rome. In the days of Roman dominion, 
and never before or after, did a single city, with its 
allied, dependent, and subject cities and lands, take up 
the whole of the civilized world. There is nothing like 
it in the world now ; but remember that, up to the time 
of the French Revolution, Venice and Bern and a crowd 
of other free and ruling cities," as they kept up a lively 
image of Rome in their internal constitutions, also kept 
up a lively image of Rome in their relations to their 
allies, dependents, and subjects. And let me point again 
to a single small state of the modern world, which still 
keeps up an image of the position of the free common- 
wealths which lay within the geographical border of the 
Roman dominion. The commonwealth of San Marino, 
the last of many and more famous Italian common- 
wealths, still abides, surrounded by the kingdom of Italy, 
but forming no part of that kingdon. International law- 
yers can tell you whether there is any particular engage- 
ment to the contrary; otherwise I conceive that it is open 
to San Marino, if the fancy took her, to declare war 
against the Empire of Russia or against the United 
States. The difficulty would be that San Marino could not 
get at her enemies, and that her enemies" could not get 
at San Marino, without the leave of the King of Italy. 
Now San Marino stands by itself; it is more of a polit- 
ical curiosity than anything else ; it is perfectly harm- 
less, and the King of Italy has no kind of temptation to 
interfere with its rights. But let us suppose that there 
was several San Marinos geographically placed within 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 323 

the Italian kingdom. Let us suppose that, not a small 
rural district, but several of the chief Italian cities, were 
as independent of the Italian kingdom as San Marino 
is. Such a state of things would be fruitful of many 
difficulties and disputes, and the King of Italy would 
lie under great temptations to interfere with their lib- 
erties. So it was with the free cities which remained 
within the Roman dominion. Any real political danger 
was prevented by their helplessness ; but it is certain 
that their nominal independence did not secure them 
from much interference, sometimes rising into actual 
oppression, whenever the policy or the caprice, either 
of the Roman government or of particular Roman 
governors, dictated such interference or oppression. 
Another special point of interest to us is the way in 
which the relations between Rome and the lands under 
her dominion are constantly referred to in the New Tes- 
tament. Nowhere does the absolute power of a Roman 
governor over the provincials, his narrowly restricted 
power over a Roman citizen, the way in which Roman 
citizenship was held by this or that man in the provinces 
by birth, grant, or purchase, the relations between the 
Roman governors and the native princes who reigned 
under Roman supremacy, come out more strongly. 
Pilate, Festus, Felix, the Herods, Saul of Tarsus, the 
Jew who has inherited the Roman franchise, Claudius 
Lysias, the Greek who has bought it, the regard shown 
by the Roman officer to the privileges of his Roman 
fellow-citizen, the fear of the Philippian magistrates, 
when they find that they have broken those privileges, 
are all among the most living bits of Roman history 
that we have. They are almost our only glimpses of 



324 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Roman political life from the point of view of the ordi- 
nary provincial. In some things they give us a lively 
image of British rule in India, while in other things the 
two systems of rule are wholly different. The Herods 
exactly answer to an Indian prince under British su- 
premacy; but the distinction of provincials, Italians, 
Latins, and Romans, has no parallel under British rule. 
In theory the Hindoo is as much a British subject as the 
Englishman, and in theory one British subject is as good 
as another. That such a theory is not, and cannot be, 
practically carried out, I need hardly stop to prove. 
Perhaps I need not go so far as either India or Rome 
for examples of the same law of human nature. 

Some of our instances have carried us a little beyond 
the time which we had reached. We have passed from 
the days of the commonwealth into the days of the 
Empire. At the beginning of the first century before 
Christ the Roman power was far from having reached 
the full measure of its geographical extent. It was still 
far from taking in the whole of the coasts of the Medi- 
terranean sea. But it was already spread over a very 
large part of the three continents. From its European 
centre it commanded or influenced the greater part of 
the three peninsulas of southern Europe, and it had won 
large provinces both in Asia and Africa. In fact, though 
the destiny of Rome was not yet carried out, yet it had 
become perfectly plain what that destiny was to be. 
Rome had advanced and was advancing. The only two 
powers which had once been able to meet her on equal 
terms, Carthage and Macedonia, had come to be part of 
her foreign dominion. Macedonia under her own name 
was a Roman province. Of Carthage the very name was 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 325 

blotted out, the very site was left desolate. The Roman 
province of Africa had taken the place of the greatest 
of the cities of Canaan. The Mediterranean shores 
were studded with cities and kingdoms, some nomi- 
nally independent, some under a greater or less amount 
of Roman influence, some even with which Rome had 
as yet hardly had any dealings. But there was no 
power which, standing alone, could withstand Rome, 
and there was no chance of any general union against 
Rome on the part of a crowd of scattered cities and 
lands, differing in language and manners and all that 
keeps cities and lands apart from one another. The fate 
of all was plain ; all were to be swallowed up sooner or 
later, later it might be rather than sooner. For Rome 
never hurried. It is the manner of governments of that 
class, aristocratic in feeling and action, whether aristo- 
cratic or not in the actual form of government, not to 
hurry. A king is eager to distinguish his own reign ; 
a popular assembly is eager to see great things done in 
its own day ; an aristocracy has more of corporate feel- 
ing ; it does not risk a greater future gain by clutching 
too greedily at a present gain. Rome let down her vic- 
tims very easily. It was commonly by slow stages of 
dependence in various degrees that her once equal ene- 
mies or allies sank to the fate of provinces. Some, as 
we have seen, as far as names and formulae were con- 
cerned, never sank to it at all. But all, in substance if 
not in name, were sooner or later to be swallowed up 
in the vast gulf of Roman dominion. By the beginning 
of the first century before Christ the great ruling city, 
the type of ruling cities, had already stretched her rule 
over so many lands and cities that it was plain that all 



326 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

that remained in this her destined range, within the 
civilized world of the time, within the lands round the 
Mediterranean sea, were only waiting for their turn. 

While Rome had thus waxed mighty in distant lands, 
her dominion was threatened for the last time in her 
own peninsula. Threatened indeed she was as she had 
never been threatened even by Pyrrhos or Hannibal. 
The old local warfare of the first days of the common- 
wealth, the older local warfare of the first kings, seemed 
to have come back, when Rome had again to fight, not 
only for dominion but for life, against Italian enemies at 
her own gates. The Italian allies, who had borne so 
great a share of the burthen of Rome's conquests and 
who had reaped so small a share of their fruits, were 
naturally dissatisfied with their dependent position. It 
must have been specially galling to them to see the 
Roman franchise lavished as it was on enfranchised 
slaves, strangers from every corner of the earth, while 
it was refused to tried fellow-soldiers, children of Italy 
no less than the proudest Roman. They demanded full 
admission to the ruling commonwealth in the building 
up of whose greatness they had had no small share. 
The gift was refused ; the Social War followed, the 
war between Rome and her allies, which became so 
strangely mixed up with the civil wars of the Romans 
themselves. Then for the last time the stubborn Sam- 
nite rose with the avowed purpose of destroying Rome, 
and was himself destroyed by the strong arm of Sulla. 
The Samnite people, we may safely say, were wiped 
off the face of Italy. The other Italian nations 
won the boon for which they strove, the citizenship 
of Rome. 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 327 

Now mark again, all that was given, all that was 
asked, all that was seemingly thought of on either side, 
was the local franchise of the local Roman city. When 
this was first denied, the allies set up a new Rome of 
their own as a rival of the old, the city Italy. The city 
Italy was but for a moment ; the end of the struggle was 
that such of the allies as lived through it became citi- 
zens of Rome. That is, they obtained a franchise which 
could be exercised only by the citizen going to Rome 
and there giving his vote in person. The thought of any 
other system seems not to have come into men's heads. 
The only questions raised were into which of the exist- 
ing tribes the new citizens should be admitted, or whether 
new tribes — and, if so, in what number — should be cre- 
ated to receive them. No thought of representation 
suggested itself. Yet representation would at once have 
solved the difficulty. When a commonwealth is spread 
over so large a space as all Italy, the right of choosing 
a representative becomes far more really valuable than 
what in theory is the higher right of appearing in per- 
son in a national assembly. This last right, when spread 
over all Italy, was in truth a mockery. The citizen could 
do no act of citizenship without going to Rome. If he 
went to Rome, he found himself a member, not of the 
comparatively small assembly of Athens, but of a multi- 
tude which might number its hundreds of thousands, a 
multitude which could at most say Yea or Nay, and 
which, unlike the smaller assemblies of earlier times, was 
beginning to show no small tendency to substitute the 
strong hand for the free vote. There is no more in- 
structive lesson in all history than this. It shows that, 
even when there is no doubt as to the existence of a 



328 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

political disease, it is not always easy to find the rem- 
edy. No doubt representation was the remedy that was 
wanted ; to us, used as we have been to representation for 
many ages, that remedy seems so obvious that we wonder 
that no man thought of it. But no man did think of it. 
Representation at last grew up, casually, as most things 
did grow up, in other lands, at other times, and by other 
means. Now that the evil was felt is plain. The first 
Emperor passed a reform bill. Augustus devised some 
means by which the votes of citizens in distant parts of 
Italy might be taken without calling on all of them to 
come to Rome. The pity is that this reform was not 
thought of till it had ceased to be of any moment 
whether men gave any votes or no. 

Representation was as yet unknown; what we wonder 
at is that no man was found to invent it just when it was 
wanted. We may be still more inclined to wonder, that 
no one thought of solving the difficulty by the intro- 
duction of a federal system. Why could not the several 
commonwealths of Italy have been united in a federal 
bond, with Rome as the federal head? Precedents 
abounded both in Italy and in Greece. It is perhaps 
less easy to see why the allies did not ask for some sy- 
stem of this kind; it is very easy to see why Rome would 
never have consented to such a change except under 
compulsion. Not a few federal unions had been already 
formed, but they had been mainly formed among cities 
which felt the need of union for defence against threat- 
ening enemies. Each city saw in each of its fellows a 
helper and defender. We cannot conceive Rome, at 
this stage, entering into an equal federal bond with her 
Italian allies, or even being satisfied with any reasonable 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 329 

kind of federal headship. A federal union of Italy 
under Rome would have been too much like the federal 
union of Boiotia under Thebes. The president would have 
been too nearly akin to a tyrant. And yet such a position 
would hardly have satisfied Roman pride. Rome had 
been so long used to look upon direct dominion as her 
right that the limited power of a federal head would 
have seemed less than her due. To admit the allies to 
her own citizenship was doubtless some sacrifice ; but it 
it was a smaller sacrifice than this. But nothing shows 
more strongly how all political thinking in those days 
started from the idea of the city as the primary unit than 
this extension of the local franchise of the Roman city 
to all the free inhabitants of Italy. A scheme which to 
our notions seems utterly preposterous was the only 
means that could be hit upon for raising the Italian 
to the level of the Roman. 

Thus all Italy became Roman, as all Latium had 
become Roman long before. Swiftly on the Social 
war followed those conquests of Pompeius, Caesar, 
and others, which carried the Roman dominion round 
the whole Mediterranean. Pre-eminent among them 
stand the annexations of Pompeius in Syria, of the 
elder Caesar in Gaul, of the younger Caesar in Egypt. 
The work of Rome was now practically done. At the 
beginning of the century no power was left which was 
in the least able to withstand Rome on equal terms ; by 
the end of the century those lands and cities which had 
not been practically incorporated with the Roman terri- 
tory were mere survivals of a past state of things, scat- 
tered exceptions to the general rule of Roman dominion. 



330 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Then, just at the time when the dominion of the Roman 
city had reached its height, its position as a ruling city 
was undermined by the silent change in its own govern- 
ment. In other words, the Roman Empire had begun. 
The series of Emperors, Augusti, Patres Patriot, and the 
like, had begun with Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and 
it was not to end till the second Francis of Lorraine. 
The differences between the first and the last Emperor 
speak for themselves. But we must carefully distinguish 
the position of either the first or the last from the posi- 
tion of the central members of the series. The posi- 
tion of Diocletian and Constantine was one into which 
the position of the first Augustus gradually grew; it 
was one which gradually changed into the position of 
the last Francis. In the long journey from the sub- 
stance without the form to the form without the sub- 
stance, we have to pass through the central stage where 
form and substance were joined together. Imperator, 
Emperor, came to be a higher title than King, because 
it came to be the special title of the master of that 
dominion which was greater than all kingdoms. But 
in the beginning Imperator simply expressed one side of 
an extraordinary magistrate, whom the Roman Senate 
and People, by a special vote, clothed with extraordi- 
nary powers. Offices hitherto deemed incompatible with 
each other, powers hitherto meant to be a check on one 
another, were, by a special vote, united in a single man. 
By a succession of such votes, the extraordinary magis- 
tracy became perpetual ; the union of conflicting powers 
made their holder a practical sovereign ; after three hun- 
dred years the holders of practical sovereignty assumed 
the outward badges and titles of sovereigns. A Roman 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 33 1 

Augustus in the first days of the Empire held himself 
to be dominus to his slaves, imperator to the soldiers, 
princeps to the citizens. Before three hundred years 
had passed, he had become imperator and dominus to the 
the citizens also. But by that time the name of Roman 
citizen had been vastly extended. When the early 
Caesar described his relation to slaves, soldiers, and 
citizens, he marked that the soldier was becoming a 
distinct class from the citizen. Of his relation to the 
provinces he needed not specially to speak. They were 
the possession of the Roman Senate and the People, and 
the power of the Roman Senate and People was wielded 
by their princeps and imperator. Before three hundred 
years were gone, the distinction between citizen and pro- 
vincial had passed away, as the distinctions of Romans, 
Latins, and Italians had passed away long before, or 
survived only in legal theories. By the famous edict 
of Antoninus Caracalla all the free inhabitants of the 
Roman Empire became Romans. It is hardly a figure to 
say that all the Mediterranean lands had become Rome. 
It may be doubted whether those who were thus 
raised from the rank of provincials to the rank of 
Romans really gained anything by the change. It may 
be doubted whether he who raised them meant them to 
gain anything. But the edict of Antoninus is none the 
less one of the great stages in the history of Rome and 
of the world. It looks both backwards and forwards. 
It marked that the distinction between Roman and pro- 
vincial had practically lost its significance. Ever since the 
Empire began, it had lost its political significance. The 
citizen, as the Acts of the Apostles alone would teach us, 
had valuable personal privileges ; but the private citizen 



332 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

had no more voice in directing the affairs of the Empire 
than the provincial. The popular Assembly died out 
very early ; the Senate, the Consuls, the other magis- 
trates, went on ; but all that they did was by the Empe- 
ror's sufferance or at his bidding. Citizens and provin- 
cials were practically alike the Emperor's subjects, though 
citizens were undoubtedly in some things a favoured class 
of subjects. But there can be no doubt that the prov- 
inces had greatly gained by the silent change from a 
commonwealth to a practical monarchy. To the Roman 
Senate and People the provinces were simply possessions. 
They were possessions out of which all who went to 
make up the corporate landlord had to make spoil. 
The proconsul who was sent to rule the province was 
sure to make a great deal ; any Roman citizen who 
visited it might hope to make something. Everywhere 
and in everything the Roman was a member of a ruling 
class, the provincial was a member of a subject class. 
The provinces were ruled, or rather plundered, in the 
interest of the privileged class, above all in the inter- 
est of the leading members of the privileged class. 
There can be no doubt that the establishment of the 
Empire did something to better the condition of the 
provinces. A monarch may rule in his own interest, 
and not in the interest of his subjects, but a wise 
monarch soon learns that his interest and the interest 
of his subjects are commonly the same; at any rate 
he is not so likely to rule in the interest of an exclusive 
class as when the exclusive class rules itself. The Em- 
perors, practically masters alike of citizens and provin- 
cials, had no temptation beyond the natural prejudices 
of their Roman birth to oppress the provincials for the 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 333 

sake of the citizens. Such oppression as was done was 
done, not so much in the interest of Roman citizens as a 
class as in the interest of the local city as the seat of 
government. Rome had still to be adorned, the Roman 
mob had still to be pampered, at the cost of the subject 
lands. But the subject lands themselves gained by the 
fall of the liberties of the ruling city. The good Em- 
perors gradually came to rule in the interest of the 
whole Roman dominion, and not of the Roman city 
only, and the bad Emperors were most to be dreaded 
by those to whom they were nearest. Some Emperors 
who bear a very bad character as rulers of Rome 
were popular as rulers of the Roman provinces. That 
the Roman Empire should go on, that all the Mediter- 
ranean lands should become Roman, would seem to 
have been for the general interests of mankind ; at all 
events, it was a necessary step for the future course of 
history, a necessary step towards the establishment of the 
modern world in which we live. And to that end it 
was, before all things, needful that the exclusive do- 
minion of the Roman Senate and People should be 
broken down. Representation, federation, constitutional 
monarchy, were remedies unheard of or impracticable. 
The despotism of the Caesars, with all its faults, was a 
needful step towards the creation of modern Europe, 
of modern Christendom. 

What then is the political lesson to be drawn from 
the fall of the Roman commonwealth, the establishment 
of the Roman Empire ? Shallow indeed would he be 
who should draw from those facts any inferences unfa- 
vourable to freedom in any of its forms. The Roman 
22 



334 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

commonwealth fell, because it had become to a great 
extent hostile to freedom. It fell, because men who 
boasted of being themselves citizens of a free common- 
wealth made it their pride to hold other cities and lands 
in bondage. It is idle to enlarge on the inconsistency 
of so doing; human nature, in all times and places, 
and under all forms of government, is inconsistent in 
such matters. What the story of Rome tells is twofold. 
First it tells us the fitting limits for a state of the prim- 
itive type, a single city or land whose citizens habitually 
meet together to exercise their franchise in their own 
persons. It sounds almost like a truism to say that the 
territory of such a state should not be so great that its 
citizens cannot thus habitually come together. But this 
is really the lesson which the comparison of Athens and 
Rome teaches us. Attica was as large a territory as 
could be administered on that system ; Italy was far 
too large. For a state of the size of Italy representa- 
tion or federation is needful. We may suspect that 
the establishment of the Empire was a gain, not only 
for the provinces, but for the more distant parts of 
Italy, for all that lay beyond the old Latium and the 
other lands in the near neighbourhood of the city. 

The other lesson might be made the theme of much 
moral exhortation which would be of little practical 
effect. The inconsistency of free states holding other 
lands in bondage is in itself a very obvious truth ; but 
it is a truth which always ceases to be obvious to the 
particular state which needs to profit by its teaching. 
It would be one degree more practical to quote the 
example of Rome as showing the danger of an enlarged 
dominion to the freedom of the ruling city itself. The 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 335 

municipal constitution of the Roman city, an admirable 
constitution for the Roman city and its original small 
territory, a constitution which had come in the best pos- 
sible way, by gradually growing up as it was wanted, 
failed, as it was almost sure to fail, as a government for 
the whole Mediterranean world, or even for the whole 
of Italy. There was nothing in it to attach the subject 
nations to it; in some cases it supplanted really free com- 
monwealths, in others it supplanted national kings ; in 
either case the Roman provincial sank to a lower level 
than he had held before he became a Roman provincial. 
To forestall for a moment, the rule of the Roman city 
offered to the subject lands no such advantages as the 
rule of the Venetian city offered in after days to its 
subject lands. The rule of Venice, with all its faults, 
was in Italy better than the rule of local oppressors ; 
out of Italy Venice was the champion of Europe 
and Christendom against the barbarian. The Roman 
Empire came in after days to hold this last place ; 
it held it from the moment that barbarian invasions 
of any * kind began ; but such can hardly be said 
to have been at any time the calling of the Roman 
commonwealth. Greece and Greek Asia did not call 
on Rome for help against Mithridates ; they rather 
looked on Mithridates as a deliverer from Roman 
oppression. We cannot disguise the fact that, in the 
rule of foreign dependencies, the rule of a common- 
wealth, unless there are some special circumstances 
like those of Venice, is commonly worse than that of 
a king. For the very essence of monarchy is rule over 
others ; the essence of a commonwealth is self-rule ; if 
it takes on itself the rule of others, it becomes a cor- 



336 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

porate king. There is no doubt that the Roman com- 
monwealth in its last days, even as an Italian, even as 
a local Roman, institution, needed the most sweeping 
of reforms.. But no reforms could ever have made the 
municipality of Rome, under any shape, a good ruler 
over all lands from the Euphrates to the Ocean. The 
Imperial rule, with all its faults, was a gain to the sub- 
ject lands. 

The extension of the citizenship to the whole Empire 
by the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was the natural 
completion of the change to practical monarchy. All 
the subjects of Caesar were now alike Romans. And, 
if this promotion was at the time little more than a 
shadow, it had most important effects on times to come. 
Hitherto the Roman power had been the very contra- 
diction of all nationality ; it had been the holding down 
of subject nations under the rule of a single city. But 
now a kind of artificial nationality was spread over the 
whole Empire ; all its free inhabitants, if not fellow- 
countrymen, were at least fellow-subjects ; they bore a 
common name ; all were proud to be able to call them- 
selves Romans ; the Empire itself gradually came to 
take the geographical name of Romania ; the Gaul and 
the Spaniard, won to Roman culture, called himself a 
Roman in opposition to his Teutonic invaders ; even 
the Greek adopted the Roman name, and kept it till the 
classical fancy of later times revived the name of Hellen. 
The Latinized Thracian has stuck to the Roman name to 
our own times, and this very year a new Roman king- 
dom on the lower Danube has taken its place among the 
powers of Europe. The subject nations, if they found 
little practical gain in the boon of citizenship, were at 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 337 

least raised in their own eyes ; they were at least raised 
to equality of servitude; they no longer saw a master 
in every Roman citizen ; the old Romans and the new 
had at least a common master in the prince who was 
fast passing from a supposed republican magistrate into 
an avowed monarch. 

When all had alike become Romans, all might alike 
become* Emperors. The Empire, in its origin an ex- 
traordinary commission which circumstances caused to 
become perpetual, passed by no definite law of election, 
by no definite law of hereditary succession. Formally, 
the Imperial power was bestowed by a special grant of the 
Senate; practically, it was the prize of any Roman that 
could grasp it. And now that the provincials were Ro- 
mans, it became the prize of the most valiant among them. 
Above all, it became the prize of stout soldiers from the 
Illyrian lands, whose swords saved Rome now that the 
inroads of our own kinsfolk had begun. Proud of the 
Roman name, proud of the Roman dominion, zealous 
in their calling as its defenders, they were little touched 
by the local associations of the eternal city, or were at 
most touched by them as strangers. They girded the 
local Rome with the walls which again were needed ; 
but they found that the local Rome was no longer fitted 
to be the seat of the Roman power. Untrammelled by 
the worn-out traditions of the commonwealth, finding 
themselves practically monarchs, they felt as monarchs. 
They forsook the local Rome for spots better fitted for 
the dwelling-place of monarchs who had a boundless 
frontier to defend against restless enemies. Emperors 
dwelled at various cities of Italy, of Europe, of Asia ; 
at Rome itself hardly ever. Under Diocletian the Em- 



338 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

perors, already for a long while more than kings in 
power, took to themselves the outward pomp, the out- 
ward badges, of kingship, all save that one forbidden 
monosyllable, that one title of Rex, at which every Ro- 
man still shuddered. For the Imperial power, now at last 
acknowledged for what it really was, Constantine found 
a fitting and an abiding home. His New Rome by the 
Bosporos became, as a seat of unbroken dominion, under 
whatever holders, far more truly eternal than the elder 
Rome by the Tiber. In all divisions of the Empire, 
whether among Imperial colleagues or among rival 
Emperors, other cities, Milan, Ravenna, Antioch, York, 
Trier, Aachen, Nikaia, Trebizond, the Old Rome her- 
self, might be at this or that time a seat of Empire ; at 
Constantinople alone dominion was abiding. As long 
as even the shadow of the Roman power lasted in the 
East, Constantinople remained the seat of Empire. The 
city which beat back the Avar, the Persian, the Bulga- 
rian, was at last stormed by the arms of Western Eu- 
rope. But the Frank still reigned in the New Rome as 
an Emperor of Romania; his rule soon gave way to the 
revived rule of the Greek still disguised under the Ro- 
man name ; and when the Greek at last gave way to the 
Turk, the Asiatic barbarian, as he seems to us, still kept 
up in some sort the succession of Augustus, Diocletian, 
and Constantine. In the eyes of his fellow-barbarians, 
the Sultan of the Ottomans, the boasted Caliph of the 
Prophet, still held the rank of the Caesar of Rome. 

What I have in this course to say about the Eastern 
lands of Rome will come at another stage. In those lands 
the Roman Empire, the Roman power, went on in its 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 339 

unbroken fulness. We have now to deal with that side 
of the Roman dominion which supplies us with illus- 
trations for the history of the older Roman common- 
wealths and of the later commonwealths which, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, arose after its pattern. Let 
no man, I would warn you, believe, as shallow books 
will tell you, that the Roman Empire, or even the 
Western Roman Empire, came to an end in the year 
476. The formal aspect of the act of that year was the 
reunion of the Western Empire with the Eastern, and 
that formal aspect, purely nominal at the time, became 
a living and practical thing, when, in the next century, 
Justinian won back Italy, Africa, and part of Spain, and 
reigned from the throne of Constantinople, over land and 
sea, from the Euphrates to the Ocean. Days of distress 
came ; the Empire which had beaten back the Persian 
and the Avar lost its provinces to the Saracen and the 
Bulgarian ; still the Old and the New Rome knew but 
one master, the Old Rome acknowledged the master 
who reigned in the New, in very truth for some way 
into the eighth century, in formal language till its last 
year. Then the Empire was split asunder for ever. 
The Frank received the crown of the West; for the 
first time the world beheld a Teutonic Augustus. In 
fact, though not yet in name, the Holy Roman Empire 
of the German Nation bep;an with the coronation of the 
German Charles. Step by step, the Roman Empire 
of the West became practically a German power; the 
Roman Empire of the East became practically a Greek 
power. Step by step, by slow steps — for it took more 
than six hundred years — the Eastern Empire was broken 
in pieces from without. Step by step, by slower steps 



340 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

still — for it took more than a thousand years — the 
Western Empire fell in pieces from within. Out of its 
broken pieces gradually grew up the states and nations 
of modern Europe. And what specially concerns us 
now, some of those states took the shape of free cities, 
of ruling cities, of confederations of lands and cities, 
furnishing us with a lively image of the free cities, the 
ruling cities, the confederate cities, of the earlier days 
of Greece and Italy. 

The mediaeval world of Europe differed from the 
older world of Greece and Italy in the days before the 
Roman power, chiefly in those points of difference which 
arose out of the fact of the existence of the Roman 
power. Not the least of these was the existence of that 
religion of which Rome was first the persecutor and then 
the missionary. In the elder state of things, every city, 
every land, every kingdom where kings still lingered, 
clave to absolute independence as a cherished ideal, even 
though in fact absolute independence might be cut short 
by the predominance of some ruling city or other 
power. In the mediaeval world, on the other hand, the 
theory was that the Roman Emperor was lord of the 
world, that every city, every principality, every kingdom, 
was under at least the external supremacy of the one 
prince who alone was Emperor, who alone was Monarch, 
who alone claimed to be the temporal Vicar of God upon 
earth. That some cities, some kingdoms — the English 
kingdom pre-eminent among them — emphatically, even 
ostentatiously, denied the Imperial supremacy, is the 
best of all signs that the existence of that supremacy 
was everywhere the received theory. But the Empire, 
placed in the hands of a Teutonic king, took another 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 341 

character from that which it had held in the hands of a 
Roman citizen. Step by step, while its boundless dig- 
nity remained, its practical authority lessened. If theory 
asserted everywhere at least its outward supremacy, in 
practice it kept little beyond that outward supremacy 
anywhere. Cities, lands, dukes, kings, might acknow- 
ledge Caesar as a theoretical superior, they might even 
take their place in some great assembly summoned at 
his bidding, and yet they might in every-day life, act 
as freely in matters of war, peace, and alliance, as could 
Athens, Sparta, Aitolia, Achaia, cities and leagues which 
knew no superior on earth. This was largely the case 
in Germany, where the exercise of the Imperial su- 
premacy and the gathering of assemblies at the Impe- 
rial bidding never quite died out, till the Empire ceased, 
even in name, to be. It was still more thoroughly the 
case in Italy, where the Imperial supremacy gradually left 
no traces beyond the occasional appearance of a king to 
be changed into an Emperor by his coronation, and his 
occasional bestowal of a formal title. So it was for a while 
in the lands which once formed the Burgundian kingdom, 
lands where, in those parts which have escaped French 
annexation, local freedom has kept on a very stubborn 
life down to our own day. In England, almost alone, 
strong national unity and the strong power of the Crown 
hindered the growth either of free cities or of indepen- 
dent principalities. One or two earls, one or two bi- 
shops, had rights which, if .all earls and bishops had held 
the like, would have made England split up as Ger- 
many did split up. And not a few English cities and 
boroughs had local constitutions, local privileges, local 
powers, which might well have grown into independent 



342 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

commonwealths, if the powers of the English kings had 
ever become as small as the practical powers of the 
Western Emperors. So much the better for England. 
What was lost in local freedom and local greatness was 
won for the common freedom and greatness of the 
whole land. 

There is perhaps a more excellent way still, of which 
I hope to speak hereafter. As yet I have only to say a 
few words on the free cities of the Middle Ages, and 
specially on those among them which rose to the rank 
of ruling cities. Two regions of Europe stand out 
before all others as the homes of free cities, especially 
of ruling cities. There is Italy, northern and central ; 
there are those border-lands of Germany and Burgundy 
at whose cities and other states we shall have to look 
again in another character, as they grow into the Confed- 
eration of Switzerland. We have now to look at them 
only in their character of free cities and lands, of ruling 
cities and lands. The districts which made up the Old 
League of High Germany, the Swiss Confederation of 
later times, show us a varied picture of every kind of 
relation of alliance, dependence, and subjection. This 
or that town or land was subject to this or that other 
town or land, or to several towns or lands in joint 
dominion. And it should specially be noticed that, in 
those dependent lands of Switzerland to which several 
cantons in turn sent a governor, a vogt or bailiff, it was 
always found that the subject lands were better off 
when the bailiff came from an aristocratic canton. A 
patrician of Bern or Basel, even if he did not forget his 
own interests, had gained experience at home in the art 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 343 

of government A landman of Uri, who had too often 
bought his office in the Landesgemeinde, sought for no- 
thing but to recover with interest what he had spent, and 
proved a far more oppressive ruler. Here we have the 
same lesson : the local government of a democratic city 
or a democratic land is, by its very nature, unsuited to act 
as the ruler of other cities or lands. So in Italy, demo- 
cratic Florence deemed it one chief object of her policy 
to keep Pisa in bondage ; when Pisa was set free from 
Florence, and Florence was set free from her own 
tyrants, the first desire of every Florentine was to take 
away from Pisa the freedom which he rejoiced to have 
won back for his own city. In truth, there was hardly 
a free city which had not something of a subject terri- 
tory attached to it. I may add that there is a survival 
of something very like this rule even in England. The 
county of Middlesex is in some sort a subject district to 
the city of London. It is a clear mark of subjection 
when any town or district has to receive magistrates 
who are neither of its own choosing nor yet appointed 
by the general government of the whole country. Now, 
the Sheriffs of the city of London, chosen by the citi- 
zens of London, act also as Sheriffs of the county of 
Middlesex. That is, so far as the chief executive officers 
of the county are concerned, the people of Middlesex 
have magistrates who are neither chosen by themselves 
nor appointed by the Crown, but who are put upon 
them by their neighbours of London. So far as its 
Sheriffs are concerned, the county of Middlesex is cer- 
tainly a province of London ; it is, like Triphylia or the 
Levantine Valley, a subject land. 

This is of course a mere survival without practical 



344 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

importance; except in this purely formal matter, the 
Middle-Saxons have the same rights as the rest of 
the people of the United Kingdom. A much more 
remarkable case of a ruling city, or rather of two cities 
ruling in partnership, was still in being sixteen years 
back; whether it is in being still I know not; most 
likely later changes have swept it away. When I was 
in North Germany in 1865, the two Hanseatic cities of 
Liibeck and Hamburg held the small district of Vier- 
lande in joint sovereignty, what is technically called con- 
dominium. This was exactly like the holding of subject 
districts by two or more cities or lands of the Old League 
of High Germany till masters and subjects became mem- 
bers of the Swiss Confederation on equal terms. But 
among all ruling cities of the later world, we may pick 
out two, cities, both of them cities whose names we have 
already often spoken, one of them a ruler by land, the 
other a ruler by sea and land, one of the Teutonic 
tongue, the other of the Romance, but each bearing 
rule over cities and lands of other tongues than its own. 
Bern on her peninsula, looking forth upon her subject 
mountains, is the queen of ruling cities of the mainland, 
queen of ruling cities of Teutonic speech. Venice on 
her islands, looking forth upon her subject mountains 
and yet more upon her subject seas, is the queen of 
ruling cities of the waters, queen of ruling cities of the 
Romance speech. Of Romance speech she is, and she 
was ruler over wide and fair lands of that speech, wide 
and fair lands and noble cities of the Western Empire. 
But Venice herself grew into being as a city, not of the 
Western Empire, but of the Eastern. And the most 
glorious part of her history belongs to lands beyond 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 345 

our present immediate range, but lands at which we 
may well take a glance before we have done. Venice 
is, before all things, 

Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite. 

And that character of the Republic gives to one side of 
her a nobler aspect than belongs to any other ruling 
city. In a large part of her dominion, Venice was not 
only a ruler, but a defender and deliverer. Whatever 
were the faults of her rule, and in not a few of her 
possessions those faults were many and great, she at 
at least kept out something far worse. She saved a 
large part of the Eastern lands from the dominion of 
the barbarian. One might say something almost the 
same with regard to her later possessions on the Italian 
mainland. When the independence of the several cities 
had passed away, the rule of the wise oligarchy was felt 
to be at least better than that either of local tyrants or 
of foreign kings. The men of the subject lands of 
Venice felt a loyalty towards Saint Mark which they 
did not feel towards either a Visconti or a Habsburg. 
Venice, with her earliest and greatest possessions lying 
apart from herself beyond the sea, in the lands of the 
Eastern Rome, shows us the greatest of all examples of 
the ruling city of later times, the widest in its dominion, 
the most abiding in its rule, the most far-reaching in its 
relations to other lands. But Bern, not to be compared 
to Venice in any of these points, is the more lively image 
of the elder Rome. Bern and Venice fell almost at the 
same moment, and at the hands of the same enemy. 
Bern was a city of the Western Empire in every sense 



346 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of the word. The city itself and its subject territory all 
lay within both the earlier and the later bounds of the 
Western Empire, within the Gaulish province of the first 
Augustus, within one or other of the kingdoms of his 
Frankish and Swabian successors. While Venice, as 
long as she owned any lord, bowed to the Eastern 
Caesar only, Bern, from her birth to the day when all 
external superiority was disowned, was a free Imperial 
city of the West. Bern, as a city of comparatively late 
foundation, founded on the borders of Germany and 
Burgundy, as Rome was founded on the borders of 
Latium and Etruria, a land city, growing by land, with 
the Leman lake as her miniature Mediterranean, grow- 
ing step by step, annexing town after town, land after 
land, in various relations of alliance, dependence, and 
subjection, till she had formed a continuous dominion, 
small indeed as compared with that of Rome and 
Venice, but large indeed among the neighbours of her 
own immediate world, — the city of the Bear, rather than 
the city of the Winged Lion, is the truest representative 
in the later world of at least the earlier growth of the city 
of the Wolf and the Eagle. But Bern and Venice alike are 
true parallels of Rome as examples of the long and abid- 
ing rule of a civic aristocracy. For in the mixed consti- 
tution of Rome, it was the aristocratic rather than the 
democratic side which showed itself towards the subject 
lands. Neither the Bernese nor the Venetian patriciate 
had the same origin as either the earlier patriciate or the 
later nobility of Rome ; indeed, the origin of the Roman 
and the Venetian patriciate are, as we have seen, exactly 
opposite to each other. But in all three we may study 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 347 

the growth and the nature of civic aristocracies, above 
all in their relation to subject lands. All three show us 
the special feature of aristocratic commonwealths, that 
to which mainly they owe their permanence, the rich 
crop of men who are great enough for the work that 
they have to do, but not too great. Men of the greatest 
stamp of all, whether for good or for evil, are more at 
home either in the kingdom or in the democracy. Peri- 
kles would have found but little scope in any one of the 
three. When Rome at last produced a citizen too great 
to be a citizen, her own freedom fell, if her subject lands 
gained. Venice fell by the hands of a man of the same 
mould ; Caesar and Buonaparte both display the same 
union of the highest natural gifts with the utter lack of 
moral feeling. And Bern fell, if not by the same hand 
as Venice, at least as part of the same course of events. 
The later fate of Bern has been the happier of the two. 
She was never handed over to a mere foreign oppressor, 
and she and the whole of her once subject lands — save 
her momentary possessions beyond the lake — have long 
flourished as equal members of a free confederation. 
Venice has twice groaned under a foreign yoke ; she 
and part of her once subject lands are free ; part of them 
still bear unwillingly the rule of the foreign oppressor 
to whom they have been twice betrayed. At this very 
moment, in one small corner of Europe, men stand in 
arms, as they have so often stood in other lands in other 
ages, against the selfish tyranny of the House of Habs- 
bursr. The brave men of the Bocche di Cattaro stand 
ready, not for the first time, to guard their homes and 
their chartered rights against the base faithlessness of 
their Austrian oppressor. They had no such need in 



343 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

the three centuries when the Lion of Saint Mark was 
their defender against every enemy. 

And now what immediate practical lessons may we 
learn from all this ? Are we to say that it is all matter 
of mere curiosity, and that no lessons of practical poli- 
tics can be learned from it at all ? Can we, in a world 
on so great a scale as our present world, a world so 
richly endowed with modern inventions, a world not 
only of writing and printing, but a world of steamers, 
railways, and electric telegraphs, learn anything from 
times when everything was on so small a scale, and 
when none of these great inventions were known ? I 
venture to think that we may learn much ; and I am 
strongly tempted to make one general inference, though 
an inference which I fully admit can be made only with 
some very important exceptions. The great lesson, to 
be drawn from the history of these ruling cities seems 
to me to be this : that, as a rule, the fitting extent of 
territory for any power or nation is so much, and no 
more, as a national government can administer from a 
common centre. This rule applies to great states and 
to small, to single cities and to great nations. The ter- 
ritory of a single city should not be so great as to hin- 
der its citizens from appearing personally in one place. 
Attica, not all Italy, is the measure of a city-common- 
wealth. By the same rule, the territory of a greater 
power or nation should not be so great or so geogra- 
phically disposed as to hinder its representatives from ha- 
bitually appearing in one place. I should be inclined to 
lay these down as general rules for all times and places. 
The system of provinces, of dependencies, of territories 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 349 

which cannot be brought into the general system of 
government, which need to be administered by some 
special delegated power, seems to me to be vicious in 
idea. Where there is need of a proconsul, satrap, pasha, 
governor, lord high commissioner, or any one of that 
kind, it seems to me to be a prima facie presumption 
that there is something wrong in the state of things 
which needs his presence. There is a prima facie ob- 
jection to the very notion of a dependency. Dependen- 
cies are either colonies or foreign dependencies. One is 
tempted to say, Let colonies be free from the beginning, 
and let foreign dependencies not exist at all. Yet there 
is no rule without exception. In some cases the depend- 
ent relation has worked for good ; in some special and 
exceptional cases, it would seem to be practically the 
best position for some particular lands. When Bern 
conquered Vaud from the dukes of Savoy, it may be 
doubted whether Vaud gained or lost at the time by 
passing from the rule of a despot to that of an oligarchy. 
But had Vaud remained part of the Savoyard territory, 
it is hardly likely that it would now be a free member 
of the Everlasting League. I suspect that, when a 
Spanish dependency in the Netherlands was incorpor- 
ated with France, it gained at the moment ; but had it 
remained a Spanish dependency, it would now help to 
swell the strength of independent Belgium. The pecu- 
liar position of Venice in her Eastern dependencies, her 
mission as the champion of Europe and of Christendom, 
tends to put out of the sight the darker side of her rule, 
as it showed itself in many times and places, but not in 
all. Yet all that we can say for Venice at her best is, 
that she kept out things that were worse at a time when 

23 



350 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

there was no chance of anything better ; it would be 
absurd to compare the state of her most favoured depen- 
dencies with that of either a free city or a constitutional 
kingdom. Or, to come nearer home, while no thought- 
ful Englishman can defend the acquisition of India, yet 
a thoughtful Englishman may easily defend its retention. 
We may leave the babble about honour and glory and 
empire and the outlandish thing called prestige to the 
Jingoes of " society " and the newspapers. But a thought- 
ful man might argue that, if it was a crime to take it, it 
would be a worse crime to throw it up ; he might argue 
that the British people has taken on its shoulders the 
frightful responsibility of governing millions of people 
who cannot govern themselves, and that no man can 
rightly, simply to ease himself of a burthen, cast aside 
that responsibility, with the strong chance before him 
that, whatever may be the evils of the present system, 
the evils of anything that could take its place would be 
greater. But I will rather take a case within the bounds 
of Europe where it is plain to me that a singular com- 
bination of causes has made the dependent relation the 
right thing. That may easily be the case with a state 
or people too small to stand by itself, and yet having 
too marked a separate life to be merged in any greater 
whole. Such is surely the case with those parts of the 
duchy of Normandy which, after so many ages, are still 
held by the crown of Great Britain. I was once asked in 
England, " When did we get the Channel Islands ?" I was 
driven to answer, "We never got them; they got us in 
1066." Jersey, Guernsey, and their fellows are simply 
that part of the Norman duchy which clave to its dukes 
when the rest fell away. Their people are those Nor- 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 351 

mans who remained Normans while the rest stooped 
to become Frenchmen. The Queen of Great Britain 
has a perfect right, if she will, to call herself Duchess 
of the Normans, a title which, in my ears at least, sounds 
better than that of Empress of India. Those islands, 
keeping their own tongue, their own constitution, their 
own laws, would lose not a little by being merged in 
either of their greater neighbours. They would lose 
much by becoming an English county ; they would lose 
yet more by becoming a French department. Yet they 
are not strong enough to stand by themselves ; an 
attempt on their part at perfect independence could 
lead to nothing but absorption in one direction or 
another. For a people in this case the dependent rela- 
tion is clearly the most healthy. They can keep local 
freedom only by giving up all claim to external inde- 
pendence. And the power on which they are to be 
dependent can be none but Great Britain. Union with 
France, whose whole history and spirit tends to the 
absolute incorporation of every new territory, would 
mean the extinction of all local freedom. England, 
used to dependencies of all kinds, has no temptation to 
meddle with local freedom. As dependencies of Great 
Britain, the Channel Islands practically unite the local 
freedom of a small commonwealth with the safety of a 
great kingdom. 

In your federal system the provincial or dependent re- 
lation has no place. The position of the territories, as 
distinguished from that of the States, is in point of fact 
somewhat like that of provinces, but in point of sentiment 
it is quite different. The territory is an infant state, de- 
pendent only till it is able to walk by itself. It is rather 



352 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

like a Latin colony, not yet admitted to the full Roman 
franchise, but hoping some day to be promoted to it. 
But the history of dependencies is no small part of the 
history of the world ; it is no small part of it if we do 
not look beyond the dependencies of Rome only. And 
I think that the general result of its study will be that 
there is a strong presumption against the dependent 
relation, that it is justifiable and beneficial in certain 
exceptional cases, but that it needs to have a case made 
out for it in each instance ; till such a case is made out, 
our first impression is the other way. Among the dark- 
est pages of history are those which record the evil 
deeds of princes and of commonwealths too toward 
their subject and dependent lands. Among the brightest 
pages of history are those which record the struggles 
by which subject and dependent lands have won their 
perfect independence. We can even rejoice when sub- 
ject lands have been set free by means which on every 
other ground are most alien to our feelings. We mourn 
for the overthrow alike of Bern and of Uri, but we 
must not forget that the overthrow of Bern was the 
deliverance of Vaud, that the overthrow of Uri was the 
deliverance of Ticino. The fall of Venice has no such 
redeeming side ; there all was the deepest and blackest 
treachery that the Corsican and the Lorrainer could 
devise between them. The wrong indeed has been 
partly undone in later times. One region of the old 
subject lands is now part of free Italy, another region 
is now part of free Greece. Between them, yearning to 
be like them, lie the shores and islands which have 
been twice betrayed to the Austrian intruder. 

I just now defined the fitting extent for the territory 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 353 

of a single city to be that which is not too great to 
allow of the citizens habitually assembling in their own 
persons. In the present state of Europe and America 
this is a question which it is hardly worth while to press 
further. The day of free cities seems to be past, unhap- 
pily, I think, but I fear beyond recovery. Of all that 
once were, three only remain, and of those three the 
freedom is not a little cut short. But the other rule 
which I laid down, that the limit of territory for a 
greater commonwealth or kingdom should be fixed by 
the limit within which habitual representation of the 
whole territory is possible, seems to be of constant 
and practical application. I assume of course national 
unity, or some of those substitutes for it which history 
sometimes provides. I assume, that is, either a nation 
in the strict sense, like France or Germany, or else, like 
Switzerland, an artificial nation, formed by the will and 
act of those who have formed it. I am not speaking of 
powers which are in no. sense nations, but mere gath- 
erings of odds and ends of nations, stitched together 
to patch up the family estate of a single man. It may 
be that this qualification will confine the supposed 
state within very narrow limits. It may be that it 
will allow it a boundless range of space. It may, in 
short, be as small as Switzerland or as vast as your 
own Union. But what I wish specially to point out 
is that here is the point where the practical effect 
of the great modern inventions steps in. Railways, 
telegraphs, and the like, really alter the scale of the 
world and of the things in it. The real measure of 
extent is not the area on the map, but the means of 
communication. A large area on the modern map is 



354 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

practically only of the same size as a much smaller area 
on the ancient map. Without railways, without tele- 
graphs, a land like yours, stretching from the one Ocean 
to the other, could not form one free state, even on the 
federal pattern. Your system could not be carried over 
so vast a region, if there was no quicker means of com- 
municating between Washington and San Francisco than 
the speed of a horse. One may doubt whether, even with 
railways and telegraphs, so great a territory could be 
kept together except by a federal system. No single par- 
liament could deal with all the local affairs of so many 
communities which, with so much in common, have so 
many differences of position and circumstances. This is 
the real way in which these great mechanical inventions 
affect history and politics. They allow the same moral 
forces which once affected only a smaller area to affect a 
much greater. That is, they lessen the importance of 
space and distance. The very inventions which are 
boastingly referred to as making an impassable gap 
between one age and another, and as proving the im- 
measureable inferiority of the later age, are simply the 
means of putting the two upon a level. We are enabled 
to keep on a political life essentially the same as that of 
the old commonwealths, by the very means which are 
thought to part them and us hopelessly asunder. 

We have in this short sketch and comment passed 
through many ages and many lands; but we have 
never gone beyond the ken of the great centre of the 
world's history : we have never lost sight of the seven 
hills ; we have ever had Rome to look to, whether as 
the direct cause of the events of which we speak or 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 355 

simply as illustrating our familiar law that like causes 
produce like effects. No fact in all history is plainer 
than the abiding influence of the Roman power, as the 
centre of the whole thought, one might say of the 
whole being, of the middle ages. And yet, save the 
even simple doctrine that we, men of English stock 
and speech, are really ourselves and not somebody else, 
no doctrine seems harder for the mass of men to take 
in. I remember once being looked at with dumb amaze- 
ment, as if I had been an object of preternatural anti- 
quity, because I said that I had been for some years 
contemporary with a man who had been Roman Empe- 
ror. Yet as the Roman Empire came to an end only 
seventeen years before my birth, and as the man who 
had been its last sovereign endured to live on in his 
abasement some ten or a dozen years after I came into 
the world, there was nothing very wonderful in the 
statement. The very badge of Rome is forgotten ; 
when, on tomb or tower or trophy, men see her two- 
headed eagle marking the dominion of her Caesars, to 
not a few minds the Imperial bird suggests only a shame- 
less imposture of our own times; they cry "Austria" in- 
stead of" Rome." Because a certain German duke chooses 
to call himself " Emperor " of his duchy, the grotesque 
title that he has devised is carried back into past times : 
I have heard the name of " Emperor of Austria " thrust 
upon Roman Caesars and German Kings who had no- 
thing to do with the Austrian duchy except to receive its 
homage. The last Emperor but two did indeed go to 
Rome and come away without his crown ; but, if the 
reforming Joseph had forgotten who he was, others 
remembered it for him. The Roman people, in a fit of 



356 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

abiding Ghibelinism, shouted greetings to " our Empe- 
ror," and bade him welcome to his own house. And in 
the amphitheatre of Verona the inscription may still be 
read which tells how " Imperator Caesar Josephus Se- 
cundus, Pius, Felix, Pater Patriae, Semper Augustus," 
and all the rest of it, saw the ancient building restored 
to its old bloody purpose, how with pleased eyes, like 
Claudius or Constantine, he looked upon a bull-fight, 
and, like Claudius or Constantine, received the applause 
of the people. Bear in mind, I would again ask you, 
that the Roman Empire did not end when Augustulus 
resigned the purple ; bear in mind that .it lived on in 
name for thirty years after the declaration of indepen- 
dence of the United States — that your Jefferson and 
your Adams survived it by twenty years — and that, if 
long before that time, it had become only a name, the 
survival of the name is no small witness to the long 
survival of the thing. The Empire of Frederick Bar- 
barossa was in a sense an unreal thing; that is, the 
words " Roman Empire " meant in his day something 
widely different from what they had meant in the days 
of Trajan. But it was not unreal in this sense, that the 
Roman Empire was still a name which influenced men's 
thoughts and actions, that it was still a thing for which 
men were ready to live and die. Never then forget 
this cardinal fact in the history of fourteen hundred 
years, that the Roman Empire lived on, during the 
whole of that time as a venerable name, during many 
ages of it as a living thing round which the history of 
Western Europe still gathered. And remember too 
that for a thousand years of that time it lived on in 
Eastern Europe with a more unbroken life. Of that 



THE RULING CITY AND ITS EMPIRE. 357 

life of "Rome transplanted" I shall have again to speak ; 
let me only remind you now that, as the Empire of 
Constantine Palaiologos fell with a more worthy fall 
than the Empire of Francis of Lorraine and Austria, 
so the Empire which had the nobler end was also the 
truer representative of the power which grew up on the 
seven hills by the Tiber and flitted to the seven hills by 
the Bosporos. 



LECTURE V. 

&fje OJltser atii tije $Utoer ©itglantr. 

The history of Rome, commonwealth and empire, has 
been found, in the researches which we have already made, 
to throw light on not a few of the greatest political ques- 
tions in the general history of mankind. But the two 
great branches of the English people, those who made 
only their first voyage from the European mainland to 
an European island and those who made the further voy- 
age from that European island to the American mainland, 
have been less directly touched by Rome and her power 
than most of the nations of Europe. Britain fell away 
from the elder Roman dominion before any part of the 
island had become England, and England never admitted 
the supremacy of that younger Roman dominion which 
begins with Charles the Great. Britain fell back into 
her old character of a world apart from the world of 
Rome, and it was only in a very slight measure that 
England ever gave up this character of insular inde- 
pendence. We came under the influence of Rome, but 
not under her rule. Neither our conversion to Chris- 
tianity by Roman teachers, nor our conquest by the 
Latin-speaking Norman, ever brought us within the 
Latin world in the same sense as the Latin-speaking 
lands of Italy, Gaul, and Spain. Neither were we 

358 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 359 

brought within it in the same sense as those Teutonic 
lands whose kings added the Imperial crown of Rome 
to their own Teutonic kingship. We became the disci- 
ples of the Roman Pontiff; we never became the sub- 
jects of the Roman Caesar. The Roman law had less 
effect on the law of England than on the law of any 
other part of Western Europe. Less purely Teutonic 
in our tongue — more affected, that is, by a Romance 
infusion — we are really more Teutonic in our history 
than the Teutonic realm itself. We stand in some 
measure apart both from those lands, whether Ro- 
mance or Teutonic in speech, which became part of 
the renewed Western Empire, and from those lands, 
whether parts of the Empire or not, whose speech was 
of Latin origin. On the lands of both those classes 
Rome had an amount of direct influence which she 
never had on England. Yet even the direct influence 
of Rome on England was not small. It was something 
quite different from the indirect influence which is all 
that we can claim for old Greece. If neither Latin nor 
any of its daughter-tongues ever displaced the Teu- 
tonic speech of England, yet the English tongue re- 
ceived a large Romance infusion into its vocabulary ; a 
Romance speech became for three hundred years the 
polite and courtly speech of England, and Latin itself 
became the received speech of learning, in England no 
less than in the other lands of Western Europe. And 
if the Roman law never became the groundwork of the 
law of England, as it became the groundwork of the 
law of some other European lands, yet not a small 
infusion, both from the Roman law itself and from the 
institutions of the Romance-speaking lands, made its 



360 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

way into the body of our primitive Teutonic institu- 
tions. Ours, I say, because whatever is ours is yours 
also. Whatever belongs to the elder England in the 
European island belongs no less to the younger Eng- 
land on the American mainland. If there is one point 
more than another on which I wish to insist with all 
emphasis, it is that our history is yours also — that the 
history of the United States does not begin with the 
landing of the English in America in the seventeenth 
century, but with the landing of the English in Britain 
in the fifth. The two great branches of the English 
people, geographically and politically divided of late 
years, but still none the less branches of the same peo- 
ple, had for thirteen hundred years a common history ; 
for the last hundred years they have had a parallel his- 
tory. To you, citizens of this newer England, trans- 
planted children of the elder England, common chil- 
dren with us of the oldest England of all, I would, 
before all things, preach this lesson. When you read 
the history of Aryan Europe, or of any of the nations 
of Aryan Europe, you are reading the records of a 
kindred folk, in which you have the interest of kins- 
men. When you read the history of old Greece, you 
are reading the records of that eldest branch of the 
common stock which was given to be a political and 
intellectual example to all that followed. When you 
read the history of Rome, you are reading the records, 
not only of a kindred power, but of the power which 
has stamped its direct impress for all time on all Europe 
and on all the lands colonized from Europe. But when 
you read the history of the English folk, whether in the 
isle of Britain or in the older time before any part of 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 36 1 

the isle of Britain became English, you are reading the 
records of yourselves. You are reading the records of 
the time when the two now severed branches were still 
unsevered, the time whose events, whose institutions, 
whose worthies, are the common possession of one 
branch of the common stock no less than of another. 
In the ups and downs, the defeats and the victories, of 
the earliest days of England, your share is no less than 
ours ; the long struggle with foreign invaders, with for- 
eign conquerors, with foreign-hearted kings, was waged 
by your forefathers no less than ours ; the men who 
built up the fabric of English freedom built up the 
fabric of American freedom also as part of their build- 
ing. Our blood, our speech, our memories, the long 
glories of our common ancestry, are yours no less than 
ours. As of old wherever Hellenes dwelled, there was 
Hellas, so we should deem that, wherever the English 
folk dwell, there is England. Whatever be the geo- 
graphical or the political division, be the rule that of 
a king or of a commonwealth, be the land dwelled in the 
old world or in the new, or in that newer southern world 
which has risen to take its place beside them, in all 
times and in all places the speakers of the English 
tongue, the inheritors of the English blood, are one. 
It is said that the sun never sets on the dominions of 
the British crown ; it is a higher truth that he never 
sets on the dwelling-places of the English people. 

In the present lecture I wish to say somewhat, from 
our special point of view, of the history, especially the 
constitutional history, of the English people. And I 
wish to look at that history with a special reference to 



362 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

that branch of the English people which forms the great 
commonwealth in which I now find myself. And I wish 
more specially still to look at it with reference to the 
character of that commonwealth as a federal common- 
wealth. In other words, I wish to run swiftly over, from 
my own point of view, the common history of the Eng- 
lish people down to the separation between the English 
in Britain and the English in America, and then to speak 
somewhat of those special points in your American 
polity which suggest a comparison with other federal 
systems, specially those of ancient Achaia and modern 
Switzerland. I have purposely touched already on 
some particular points in all these branches of the sub- 
ject, as supplying instances of the way in which the 
history of one age and country may be illustrated by 
the history of very distant ages and countries. I shall 
now deal with them more directly as parts of a con- 
nected tale. And here mark how connexion by di- 
rect cause and effect differs from mere analogy brought 
about by the independent working of like causes lead- 
ing to like effects. The constitution of the United 
States has manifest points of likeness to the constitu- 
tion of England ; it has manifest points of likeness to 
the constitution of Switzerland. But the likeness to 
England and the likeness to Switzerland are two distinct 
kinds of likeness. Or rather, I would say that likeness 
is not the right word to use between England and 
America. Your American constitution is really our 
English constitution, first put into a formal written 
shape, and then modified in those points in which the 
circumstances of the American States required it to be 
modified. I decline to look uoon it as a new think ; I 

J. o / 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 363 

look upon it as an old thing, largely changed indeed in 
detail, but still keeping its essential identity, with its 
own older forms. The men of the eighteenth century 
reformed, as the men of the thirteenth and of the seven- 
teenth century had reformed before them. Some might 
say that the likeness is the likeness between parent and 
child ; I would rather call it the likeness between a man 
at one stage of his growth and the same man at some 
earlier or later stage. But the likeness between the 
American and the Swiss system is of another kind, or 
rather of more than one other kind. Neither has any 
direct connexion with the other, neither has had any 
direct influence on the other, in the way of cause and 
effect. But each has that likeness to the other which 
comes of like causes leading to like effects. And each 
has had over the other the direct influence of example. 
The Swiss Union is in one sense older, in another sense 
younger, than the American Union. The older and 
laxer form of the Everlasting League was undoubtedly 
before the ages of the men who drew up your Declara- 
tion of Independence and your first Articles of Con- 
federation. But the American Constitution of 1789 was 
still more plainly before the eyes of the men who drew 
up the Swiss Constitution of 1848. As I have already 
said, its founders, like the wise men that they were, fol- 
lowed your American model in some points that suited 
them and forbore to follow it in some other points that 
did not suit them. And so, before them, the founders 
of the American constitution, like the wise men that 
they were, I will not say followed, but rather preserved, 
the constitution of England in those points in which it 
still suited the changed circumstances of America, and 



364 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

modified it in those points in which it no longer suited 
those changed circumstances. 

In this inquiry, be it observed, that side of it which 
deals with analogy and example still keeps us in the 
strictest sense within the bounds of Rome and her 
Empire. If we look back to old Achaia, we look back 
to one of the powers which lost itself in the mass of the 
elder Roman Empire ; if we look to more modern 
Switzerland, and to the German realm from which 
Switzerland did but part off, we are looking at one of 
the powers which arose out of the break-up of the later 
Roman Empire. That side therefore of your polity 
which is most modern connects itself more directly with 
illustrations, analogies, conscious and unconscious repro- 
ductions, which keep us within the Roman range, or 
which, if they pass its bounds, carry us on to the older 
days of Greece. That side of your polity which is 
older, that which is English by direct and unbroken 
continuity, takes us into the world which lay beyond 
the world of the Caesars. It takes us into the world of 
those Teutonic tribes which, having lived beyond Cae- 
sar's rule on the European mainland, went forth to carry 
their Teutonic speech, their Teutonic polity, their Teu- 
tonic creed, into' the island from which the rule of Caesar 
had passed away. We cannot, by any reckoning of 
dates, carry back any records of this primitive Eng- 
lish polity into days so ancient as the days of your 
old Achaian model and of the earlier Greek confede- 
rations which were its models. But if not in years, 
yet in idea, it is far older. Not only Aratos and Philo- 
poimen, but Agamemnon and Achilleus, belong to a 
later stage of political developement than Hengest and 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 365 

Cerdic. The federal General, the forerunner of the fed- 
eral President, marks a far later stage than the king of 
the city. But the king of the city marks a later stage 
than the ealdorman of the tribe. And remember that 
it was not by kings, but by ealdormen, that the land 
of Britain was won for the English folk. Their king- 
ship began in the conquered island; it was again to 
yield to the rule of ealdormen under other names, of 
Presidents and Governors, when Englishmen had won 
themselves a third home beyond the Ocean ; it was to 
live on in the island of its birth, as an useful formula 
and an useful pageant. It is well to remember in how 
many things, both you in this later England and we in 
our older one, have advanced by going back. And 
among them it is well not to forget that, when, like the 
men of Rome and the men of Athens, you exchanged 
the rule of kings for that of magistrates, you did but 
fall back on the most ancient polity of the English 
folk. 

Let us then start from those earliest times, from that 
primitive polity. Look at our own forefathers, yours 
alike and ours, settling themselves in small communities, 
each living its own life, each making its way by its own 
strength, upon the conquered shores of Britain. Ages 
afterwards, your immediate forefathers, that part of the 
English people which made the second of their great 
voyages, did the like upon the shores of America, 
Mark, I leave out the epithet " conquered." Conquest 
in the strictest sense played a far smaller part in the 
second migration than it played in the first. For the 
English settlers in America found no such enemies in 
the land to strive against as the earlier English had 
24 



366 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

found. The native Indian was not as the Briton, him- 
self an Aryan kinsman, and still keeping some traces of 
the arts of Rome learned in three hundred and fifty 
years of Roman rule. , Yet in many things the men of 
the seventeenth century, while bringing with them the 
civilization and experience of the seventeenth century, 
were driven to play over again the parts of the men of 
the fifth and sixth centuries. Not a few of the primi- 
tive institutions of the Teutonic people sprang again 
to life when the English settlements were made on 
American soil. In this case, unless we go so far as to 
call in any notion of abiding, though unconscious, tend- 
encies in the race, the likeness comes wholly from the 
rule of like causes producing like effects. Assuredly 
the settlers of the seventeenth century had not the 
faintest thought of consciously following the example, 
or of reproducing the institutions, of the settlers of the 
fifth century. What they did consciously reproduce 
was the institutions of England in their own time, so 
far as they could be reproduced under the circumstances 
of their new land. And it so happened that the circum- 
stances of their new land caused them in some points 
unconsciously to reproduce the English institutions of 
the fifth century rather than the English institutions of 
the seventeenth. 

Between the fifth century and the seventeenth, the 
institutions of England and the whole national life of 
England had grown up to full maturity, Or rather we 
may say that they had reached their full maturity at a 
time a good deal earlier, and that at the actual moment 
of the settlements in America the genuine institutions 
of England had, not so much gone backward as rather 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 367 

in a manner fallen into abeyance. Between the days of 
the first settlement in Britain and the end of the four- 
teenth century the main outlines of the English con- 
stitution, very much as it still stands in outward form, 
had been already traced. The endless small settlements 
of the English in Britain were merged, first into seven 
chief kingdoms, then into a single kingdom of all Eng- 
land. With each advance of territory the kingly power 
had grown ; the king of a great kingdom, withdrawn 
from all daily contact with the great body of his sub- 
jects, becomes, by the mere force of distance and mys- 
tery, more of a king than his predecessor who reigned 
only over a small island or a single shire. And, in the 
same way, without any formal change, the democratic 
character of the primitive Teutonic assembly passed 
away. The law which we have seen working in Greece 
and Italy found full play in England also ; with each 
advance of territory, it became more and more impos- 
sible for all the freemen of the kingdom habitually to 
come together in one place. The national assembly, 
the Witenagembt, the Meeting of the Wise Men, shrank 
up insensibly into a gathering of the great men of the 
land and of the king's immediate followers, that later 
nobility of the thegnhood which, as we have seen, sup- 
planted the ancient nobility of the eorls. The ancient 
popular character of the assembly revived only now and 
then, when some special cause brought together unusual 
numbers, or when the assembly was held in or near a 
great city, whose citizens could without difficulty appear 
in person. The English assembly in short passed through 
that change which must happen to the assembly of every 
state which has passed the limit which allows all freemen 



368 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

habitually to meet together, and in which the device of 
representation has not been thought of. Presently came 
the great blow of the Norman Conquest, one of whose 
chief immediate results was to hasten and strengthen a 
crowd of tendencies which were already at work, and 
among them all that in any way tended to the increase 
of the kingly power. But the final result was to call 
up again the old national life in new shapes, to open 
the way for a second growth of English freedom more 
lasting than the first. The Norman nobles changed 
on English ground into worthy leaders of the Eng- 
lish people, champions of English freedom against 
kings who remained or became foreign after all their 
subjects had become English. Kings seeking their own 
ends, patriots seeking to curb the power of kings, alike 
hit on the device of calling on communities of men, 
shires, cities, boroughs, to send a few of their number 
to act on behalf of the whole. Thus did representatives 
of the people come to take their place in the national 
councils alongside of those great men of the realm who 
had never lost the ancient right of every freeman to 
appear in his own person. In place of that ancient 
right, the very shadow of which was now passing out 
of mind, the freemen of the land gained the far more 
practical privilege of choosing representatives to appear 
and act in their names. The Witenagemot, the Great 
Council, now, under the name of Parliament, took the 
shape and won for itself the powers, which it has kept 
ever since. A series of experiments, a series of acci- 
dents, gave that Parliament the shape of two distinct 
chambers, and the two illustrious names of House of 
Lords and House of Commons were added to the po- 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. $6g 

litical vocabulary of England and of the world. The 
House of Lords, a house of great official personages, 
spiritual and temporal, among whom the temporal mem- 
bers soon developed a strong tendency to hereditary 
succession, continued the ancient Witenagemot unbro- 
ken. By its side arose the House of Commons, the 
elective house of the knights, citizens, and burgesses. 
Step by step, the houses established their positions as 
powers co-ordinate with one another and with the king. 
The king remained, clothed with many and mighty 
powers, which he might still exercise according to his 
personal discretion, but which he must exercise within 
the limits of the law of his kingdom. To that law he 
might not add or take away, nor might he lay any tax 
or burthen upon his subjects, without the consent of the 
two Houses of Parliament. That is, he could make no 
law, he could lay on no tax, without the combined con- 
sent of the great men of the realm speaking with their 
own mouths and of the whole commons o{ the land 
speaking through the mouths of their representatives. 
Thus we may say that the constitution of England 
was fixed by the change which, after a season of unlaw, 
gave England a constitutional king in Henry the Fourth. 
To this point it was brought back three hundred years 
later by the revolution which, after another and longer 
season of unlaw, again gave England a constitutional 
kine in William the Third. The last two hundred years 

o 

of constitutional progress in England have been spent, 
not in changing the legal powers of the three great ele- 
ments of the state, but in fixing, by the silent under- 
standing's of an unwritten constitution, the way in which 
those powers are to be exercised. Nothing has been 



370 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

taken away, as far as the written law goes, from the 
powers of the crown or of the House of Lords, but it 
is known, as well as if it had been formally proclaimed, 
that the will of the people expressed by their represent- 
atives in the House of Commons is in the end to pre- 
vail. The powers of the crown are untouched, but the 
principle is fully established that some of its powers 
shall never be exercised at all, and that the rest shall 
be exercised only by the advice of a Minister approved 
by the House of Commons, a Minister whom that House 
virtually, though not formally, appoints, and whom it can 
virtually, though not formally, remove. Silently to estab- 
lish these principles has been the work of English states- 
men since the last English revolution. The thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries drew the great outlines of the 
constitution ; the eighteenth and nineteenth have filled 
in the details. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
called the skeleton into being ; the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth clothed it with full flesh and life. It is not the least 
wonderful thing in the wonderful history of our people, 
that the bones of freedom lay for nearly two hundred 
years, almost like the bones in the prophet's vision, dry 
and seemingly lifeless, and that they then were able to 
rise up again with a revived life, to take up a renewed 
being, almost at the exact point at which they had prac- 
tically all but ceased to be. 

In a strictly constitutional point of view, the constitu- 
tional king who landed on the errand of deliverance at 
Torbay steps exactly into the place of the constitu- 
tional king who landed on the errand of deliverance 
at Ravenspur. William of Orange takes up the work 
of Henry of Bolingbroke. The Yorkist, Tudor, and 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 37 1 

Stewart reigns become a long time of unlaw, during which 
little more than the forms of the elder days were left ; 
but, because the forms were left, it was possible again to 
breathe life into them in the later days. During a suc- 
cession of reigns law was openly trampled on, not sim- 
ply in the way of irregular acts on the part of the king 
at a time when irregular acts were common on the part 
of all men, but as the deliberate system of kings who 
were strong enough to compel others to obey the law, 
but who were fully purposed not to obey it themselves. 
During this reign of unlaw, largely by the efforts of 
men who were seeking shelter from the reign of unlaw, 
the American colonies of England first came into being 
as local and isolated settlements, with institutions simply 
local and isolated. As one of the great powers of the 
world, shaping its institutions into forms suiting one of the 
great powers of the world, the United States of America 
came into being at the time when the unwritten consti- 
tution of England was fast growing, but was not yet fully 
grown, round the older fabric of her written law. 

At each of these stages the direct influence of Eng- 
land, the direct and conscious influence of cause and 
effect, comes in. In the time of the first settlers the 
notion of imitation is out of place. The English set- 
tlers in America brought the institutions of England 
with them, modifying them only as new circumstances 
needed, and, as I have already said, modifying them 
largely, though unwittingly, in the direction of institu- 
tions more primitive than those of the England of the 
seventeenth century. The institutions of the American 
colonies were not made, but grew. But the institutions 



372 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of the United States of America had in a certain sense 
to be made. I altogether decline to look on your fed- 
eral constitution as a new thing ; I maintain that it is 
in truth the existing constitution of England, largely 
modified indeed, but modified only so far as the circum- 
stances of a new state of things called for. Still the 
original settlers could hardly have done anything else but 
bring the institutions of England with them. The authors 
of the federal constitution, might, if they had chosen, 
instead of reproducing the constitution of the mother- 
country with the needful changes, have followed some 
other model or produced something wholly out of their 
own heads. In this sense the federal constitution was 
made, in a sense in which the local institutions of the 
several states could hardly be said to be made. The 
elaborate schemes which were drawn up at home for 
some of the later colonies hardly came to much. Some- 
times institutions which more truly grew supplanted 
the institutions which were more strictly made. The 
different positions and characters of the earlier settlers 
led them to reproduce different sides, and even different 
stages, of English life ; but it was natural growth either 
way. But the work of the eighteenth century was a 
conscious and deliberate work, in a sense in which the 
work of the seventeenth century hardly was any more 
than that of the fifth and sixth. I do not like to use 
the word imitation; but the later reproduction was a 
matter of choice, while in the earlier time there was 
hardly any choice in the matter. 

I may be thought to undervalue the amount of change 
between the British and the American systems, if I apply 
so small a word as modify to constitutions which dif- 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 373 

fer with all the differences which part off a federal com- 
monwealth from a consolidated kingdom. The differ- 
ences truly are great ; but I am always far more struck 
with the amount of likeness that was kept than with the 
amount of unlikeness that was brought in. Compare 
for a moment your very conservative revolution with 
the really destructive revolution which happened a lit- 
tle later in France. If you contrast the sober action of 
your wise men, preserving with a good reason here, 
changing with a good reason there, with the frantic 
havoc wrought by men bent on changing everything, 
good or bad, for the mere love of changing, you will 
see what I mean when I say that the real wonder is that 
the institutions of the United States remained so like 
the institutions of Great Britain. As it was, the cir- 
cumstances of the American colonies, needing union, 
but not minded to carry union so far as to destroy local 
independence, made a federal commonwealth the neces- 
sary form of government. The wonderful and instruc- 
tive thing is that a federal commonwealth could have 
been devised which differed so little from the consoli- 
dated kingdom which furnished its model. 

But the fact that the new power did become a fed- 
eral commonwealth carries us away to another line 
of thought; it sets us down within another range of 
parallels. The federal commonwealth of America is at 
once connected with the other federal commonwealths 
of the world, not, as in our comparison between Britain 
and America, by the law of direct cause and effect, but 
by the law that like causes lead to like effects. Alike 
in Achaia, in Switzerland, and in America, a number of 



374 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

small states, having enough in common to feel the need 
of a certain amount of union, but not enough in com- 
mon to make them inclined for absolute consolidation, 
feeling too the special need of union for external pur- 
poses against a common enemy, were led, were almost 
driven, to the federal system as the true intermediate 
point, as the system which gives as much of union as 
was wanted and not more than was wanted. And let 
me add — what I personally hope may not happen — if 
circumstances either in Switzerland or in America should 
ever lead to the forsaking of the federal system for any 
closer form of union, that will not be, as shallow people 
talk, an argument against the federal system, but rather 
a strong argument in its favour. It would only show 
that the federal system was needed as an intermediate 
stage, as a means to make that closer union possible 
which at the beginning was certainly impossible. Every- 
thing in the position, the circumstances, the traditions, 
of the American colonies suggested the federal union as 
the one system which met the circumstances of the case. 
And, exactly as in the other case, a certain amount of 
experience and of experiment was needed before the 
most perfect shape of the institution was reached. 

Between the federations of Achaia and America some 
of the points of likeness are most striking. They seem 
to me to come as near to one another as could be, con- 
sidering the difference of scale between the two terri- 
tories, and considering that representation was known 
in the one case and not in the other. Long before the 
eighteenth century, long before the seventeenth, the 
system of representation had been firmly established in 
the elder England by the work alike of wise kings and 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 375 

of patriotic leaders. It was thoroughly familiar in the 
local constitutions of the American colonies, in some 
of which indeed it had supplanted the primitive Teu- 
tonic democracy which had again sprung to life in the 
institutions of the first settlers. But for its establish- 
ment, it would, as I said long ago, have been impossible 
to remedy the main evil of the Achaian and other 
ancient federal systems, and to represent in two houses 
the two elements of the federal system, the separate 
states and the united nation. But it is well worthy of 
notice that this application of the principle of represen- 
tation was not thought of when the first articles of con- 
federation were drawn up. In that earlier and laxer 
form of the federal union, each state, great and small, 
had an equal voice, exactly as in old Achaia. It was 
only in the second and more perfect attempt that this 
great triumph of political skill was compassed. The 
way of compassing the object was undoubtedly sug- 
gested to the founders of the federal constitution by 
the two houses of the British Parliament. That system, 
itself the result of accident, was turned about to fulfil a 
certain end which had assuredly never been thought of 
in its elder home. And, as the forms of the English 
constitution supplied the means for correcting an un- 
avoidable defect in the Achaian system, so those forms 
also made possible the revival, I feel sure the unwilling 
revival, of a most characteristic feature of that system. 
The position of the President of the United States is, I 
think, one which would hardly have occurred to men 
whose political experience was purely republican. The 
President is, beyond all doubt, the English king modified s 
by the necessities of a state of things in which heredi- 



376 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

tary succession was out of the question, and in which 
even a life term of office would have awakened the 
greatest jealousy. But in transplanting this modified 
republican image of the English King, the founders of 
the American constitution stumbled on a no less lively 
image of the Achaian General. I should say that no 
republican constitution, certainly no earlier federal con- 
stitution, ever entrusted such large powers to a single 
man as Achaia gave to her General and as the United 
States give to their President. The Roman dictator 
indeed held greater powers still, but then his office 
was not a standing magistracy, but a special commission 
granted in some moment of extraordinary need. The 
powers of the earlier Roman consuls and of the later 
Spartan ephors must have been quite as great, but then 
they were not held by a single man. And in the case 
of Achaia the great position of the federal General is 
the more remarkable, because the single generalship was 
deliberately introduced after some experience of a sy- 
stem like that of Rome, t$r which the chief magistracy 
was put into the hands of two holders. Had the foun- 
ders of the constitution lived a little later, they might 
possibly have been led to make the likeness between 
the Achaian General and the American President still 
closer. When the federal constitution of the United 
States was drawn up in writing, the unwritten constitu- 
tion of Great Britain was fast growing, but was not yet 
fully grown. The state of things established by the 
revolution of 1399, and established again by the revo- 
lution of 1688, amounted pretty much to this, that the 
king was strictly bound by the law, but that, within the 
limits of the authority which the law gave him, he could 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 377 

rule according to his own personal will. Mark you 
that this is very much the position of your own Presi- 
dent ; it is the natural position of any republican magis- 
trate, indeed of any elective officer, who is supposed, in 
courtesy at least, to be chosen to his office on account 
of his personal fitness. But in the course of the hun- 
dred years between the English revolution and the 
enactment of your federal constitution considerable steps 
have been taken toward the establishment of the modern 
doctrine that the king must rule only by the advice of 
ministers approved by the House of Commons. It is 
quite certain — you know it well enough in this land and 
we know it well enough in ours from another side — that 
George the Third did exercise a will of his own in pub- 
lic affairs. Indeed it is a great mistake to fancy that the 
will of a king in any case goes for nothing. It must 
always go for a good deal in the case of the most con- 
stitutional king of the most constitutional kingdom. If 
a king cannot enforce a policy, he can do a great deal to 
hinder one. It is certain that George the Third could 
act more freely than his modern successors, and, through 
his special circumstances, more freely than his imme- 
diate predecessors ; still he was certainly in a different 
position from Henry the Fourth or William the Third. 
When Lord North found it necessary to disclaim the 
name of Prime Minister, it was proof enough that he 
was Prime Minister. The system of Cabinet Govern- 
ment, though it had not reached its full developement, 
was fully established. But the fact was hardly recog- 
nized either in Britain or in America. Writers like De 
Lolme, as Macaulay long ago remarked, take no notice 
of it; the writers in the Federalist take no notice of it; 



378 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

they suppose throughout that a King of Great Britain 
exercises, and exercises according to his personal will, 
every power which the letter of the law entrusts to him. 
The relations between a modern King and a modern 
Prime Minister seem not to have come into their minds. 
The result is that your President, while holding powers 
smaller than those of a King of Great Britain, can 
exercise such powers as he has far more freely than a 
king can. Now the Achaian General, while in most 
things a lively forerunner of your President, did in some 
things come nearer to the position of an English Prime 
Minister. Here again comes in the difference between 
representation and no-representation. Both the Houses 
of your Congress are strictly representative, the Senate 
no less than that which is specially called the House of 
Representatives. From those houses the Ministers of 
the President are shut out. In the earlier times of the 
Union the President addressed Congress in a speech — 
like a king's speech ; in later times he has sent only a 
written message. But at neither stage could the Presi- 
dent or his ministers be members of either house or 
take part in its debates. But it is of the essence of 
the unwritten English constitution that the Prime Min- 
ister and his colleagues in the Cabinet should be mem- 
bers of one or the other house of Parliament. There 
they are called in question; there they defend them- 
selves. I will not now discuss the comparative merits 
of the two systems ; my point is that the British system 
was also the Achaian system. A representative system 
can, at pleasure, admit the members of the executive 
Government to the assembly, or it can shut them out. 
But from a primary assembly, where every citizen has 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 379 

a right to attend, the chief magistrate and his colleagues 
can no more be shut out than any other citizens. Thus 
the Achaian General, a member of the assembly but not 
the president of the assembly, held the exact parliamen- 
tary position of an English Prime Minister, a position 
which was not thoroughly grasped by the founders of 
your federal constitution nor by any of their contempo- 
raries. It is possible that, had they completely seen the 
working of the British cabinet system, they might have 
made the President less of a king and more of a prime 
minister. I shall presently say a word or two about the 
Swiss Federal Council, the executive of the Confedera- 
tion. I have here only to notice that, while with you 
the Ministers of the President are shut out from both 
houses of Congress, the members of the Swiss executive, 
though not members of the assembly and not having 
the right of voting, can attend at pleasure in either 
house and take part in its debates. Thus the Achaian, 
the English, and the Swiss systems all allow the policy 
of the Government to be stated and defended in Par- 
liament by the members of the Government, which the 
American system does not allow. 

In this way then the position of the Achaian General 
did, in its practical working, come nearer to that of an 
English Prime Minister than to that of an American Pres- 
ident. But his formal position was that of a President, 
not that of a Prime Minister. The General, like the 
President, like any republican magistrate — indeed like 
any magistrate strictly so called — exercised openly in 
his own name such powers as the law of the confedera- 
tion gave him. The minister of a king necessarily acts 
indirectly in the name of the king who is the legal 



380 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN PIISTORY. 

holder of power. The General, like the President, was 
formally chosen, chosen for a definite time, and, under 
ordinary circumstances, incapable of removal till the end 
of that time. The Prime Minister, as such, is neither 
formally appointed nor formally removed, for no such 
office as Prime Minister is known to the law. Nor does 
he hold power for any definite time. We may say that 
he is informally chosen and informally removed by the 
House of Commons ; that is, he holds power for such a 
time, long or short, as the House of Commons continues 
to approve of his policy. This I myself have always 
held to be the great advantage —balanced by some dis- 
advantages — of our informal republic called a constitu- 
tional monarchy over your avowed republic. The 
existence of the king gives our House of Commons 
the power of practically dismissing the executive gov- 
ernment, as soon as it simply ceases to approve of its 
policy. Your chief magistrate, because he is a chief 
magistrate and not a minister, cannot be removed from 
office without the formal proof of some definite crime, 
nor can he be continued in office beyond his term except 
by a formal re-election. This difficulty seems to be 
inherent in the position of any republican magistrate, 
but it must be felt far more strongly in the case of a 
chief magistrate chosen for four years than in the case 
of one chosen, as in Achaia, for one year, or, as in some 
other commonwealths, for a shorter time. And may I 
hint that the Achaian system may on one point throw 
some light on a point in your federal system which I 
have heard debated on both sides of the Ocean ? Is it 
well to re-elect a President ? It is undoubtedly in itself 
well to continue a good President in office as long as 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 38 1 

you can keep him. But then he can be kept in office 
only by making the chief magistrate of the state, while 
still in office, become a candidate for renewed office. To 
this there are surely manifest objections. The constitu- 
tion of the defunct Southern Confederacy — which we 
may refer to as a political scheme just as much as to 
any other — forbade re-election, but gave the President 
a longer term of office. This would get rid of one evil ; 
but it would aggravate two others. The chief of the 
state could no longer be a candidate ; but then it would 
be harder than before to get rid of a bad President and 
absolutely impossible to keep on a good one. Is not 
the Achaian plan worth considering — always bearing in 
mind the difference between one year and four ? The 
General, elected for a year, could not be elected for the 
year next following : he could be elected, and often was, 
over and over again in later years, but always with a 
year's interval between his terms of office. Would not 
such an arrangement as this work better than your 
existing system, a system, by the way, purely traditional, 
and in no way ordained by the letter of the constitution ? 
The tradition is that a President may be re-elected once 
and once only. Several Presidents have held office for 
two consecutive terms ; no President has held it for 
three consecutive terms or for two terms with an in- 
terval between them. Might it not be on the whole 
a better system to forbid immediate re-election, but to 
allow re-election at any later vacancy ? The chief of 
the state would no longer, while still in office, be an 
immediate candidate for the next vacancy. You would 
indeed sometimes have to part with a President whom 
you would gladly keep; but you would not be 

25 



382 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

parting with him for ever ; you could call him back to 
power at the end of four years. There is something to 
be said for and against all these systems; but it has 
sometimes struck me that this Achaian system, under 
which Aratos was, for a large part of his life, chosen 
general in alternate years, is the one which has most 
to be said for it, and least to be said against it. 

In the Confederation of Switzerland these questions 
cannot arise in anything like the same shape. Neither 
in its oldest nor in its latest form has the Everlasting 
League ever known a personal head. There we find no 
king, no minister, no president even, in the sense which 
the word president bears on this side of the Ocean. 
But there we do find something which, if I am freely to 
speak my own mind, I must call a more excellent way 
than either. The Swiss executive, the Federal Council, 
is most like a ministry without a king, a ministry form- 
ally, instead of virtually, elected by the assembly of the 
nation. We will come back to the details presently ; let 
us first, by a sketch of the history of the Confederation, 
see how it comes that Switzerland has altogether dis- 
pensed with the personal chief whom both Britain and 
America have kept in different shapes. Is it a par- 
adox to say that the American Union has a personal 
chief because its states were once subject to a king, and 
that the Swiss Union has no personal chief because its 
states also were once subjects of a king? The Ameri- 
can states kept a personal chief, a king, one might say, 
under republican conditions, because, large as were their 
local liberties, they had had a king, an immediate though 
an absent king. The Swiss cantons felt no need of 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 383 

a personal chief, because, though they once had a 
king, they never had an immediate king, because, in a 
word, they had no king but Caesar. Of all the delusions 
against which history and historical geography have to 
strive there is none more deeply rooted than the notion 
that there has always been a land called Switzerland 
and a people called the Swiss. And there is another 
delusion like unto it, namely that the freedom of the 
Swiss lands and towns was won from personages un- 
known to history, but who figure in fiction, sometimes 
as Emperors of Germany, sometimes even as Emperors 
of Austria. Be it remembered that Sir Thomas Erskine 
May, K. C. B., Chief Clerk of the House of Commons, 
wrote a History of Democracy, which records the fact, 
quite unknown in the fourteenth century, that Duke 
Leopold at Morgarten commanded an Imperial army. I 
wonder what any professor of astronomy would say if I 
were to write a History of the Planets, and put out state- 
ments equally odd about the doings of Jupiter and Mars. 
I will not venture on any statement by way of specimen, 
lest, in trying to choose a statement that should be quite 
wrong, I might casually stumble on one which should 
be quite right. I will take for granted that it is needless 
to explain yet again the nature of the mediaeval Empire, 
and the position of its chosen chief, lord of the world, 
Emperor of the Romans, King of his three kingdoms of 
Germany, Italy, and Burgundy, but immediate sovereign 
only of those parts of his Empire which might form the 
hereditary possession of his own house. The choice of 
the electors might fall at one time on a Duke of Austria, 
at another time on a Duke of Bavaria. But whatever land 
it was which, at any particular moment, supplied Ger- 



384 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

many with her king, Rome with her Emperor, and West- 
ern Christendom with its temporal chief, his supremacy 
in no way interfered with the full local independence, 
whether of principalities, of free cities, or of free lands. 
Three such lands on the borders of the three kingdoms 
of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy, the famous lands of 
Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, towards the end of the 
thirteenth century, formed or more probably simply 
renewed, a strict alliance, the germ of the federal com- 
monwealth of two-and-twenty, more truly of five-and- 
twenty states, which still abides. The fight of Morgar- 
ten secured their freedom against the Austrian duke, to 
the delight of their Bavarian King, who deemed that, in 
smiting the supposed commander of an Imperial army, 
they were fighting the battles of the Empire as well as 
their own. Cities like Luzern, Zurich, Bern itself, did not 
scorn to join the mountain alliance, and in the course of 
the fourteenth century, the Old League of High Ger- 
many, the League of the Eight Ancient Cantons, had 
come into being. Early in the sixteenth century the 
tale was made up, and the Confederation consisted of 
the thirteen cities and lands, whose number remained 
unchanged till the last year of the eighteenth. Of some 
of the cities, specially of Bern, I have already spoken 
from other points of view ; I have now to look at them 
as a contribution to strictly federal history. It must be 
specially borne in mind that there was as yet no such 
thing as a Swiss nation, apart from the German nation. 
The Old League of High Germany was purely German ; 
it was simply one of many German leagues, whose des- 
tiny it was to win a longer life and greater independence 
than its fellows. The land of Schwyz had, as early as 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 385 

the days of Philip of Comines, begun, in popular use, to 
give its name to the whole alliance, but the name was 
never accepted as a formal title till within the present 
century. 

The federal tie, if one can call it a federal tie 
which bound together the old Thirteen Cantons, was 
of the very laxest. Not only did the cantons vary as 
widely as any states could, both in their political con- 
stitutions and, after the Reformation, in their religious 
establishments ; each acted as an independent state in its 
relations with other powers ; each could make conquests 
for itself; those whose geographical position allowed it 
had each of them its own following of allies and subjects, 
besides those districts which were allies or subjects of seve- 
ral cantons or of the League as a whole. In no part of the 
world, in no age of the world, were so many forms of 
political life, so many shades of political relation, to be 
seen within so small a space. There was the pure de- 
mocracy of Unterwalden and the close oligarchy of 
Basel ; there was the Levantine valley, held in bondage 
by the freemen of Uri who never dreamed of extend- 
ing their own freedom to their subjects; there were the 
prince and the people of Neufchatel, each so bound by 
treaties to Bern, that, if the prince oppressed his people 
or the people rose up against their prince, the Bear 
might in either case put forth his paw and bring back 
order. Within the bounds of the League and its allied 
states, there were the five cantons round the lake, firm 
and unbroken in their adhesion to their ancient faith ; 
there was Zurich, home of Zwingli, and Geneva home 
of Calvin, Geneva where to worship according to the 
elder rite was a crime for which death only could atone. 



386 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

There was Zug, unable to spread herself beyond her 
ancient limits, and Bern, mistress of a dominion which 
in old Greece would have passed for a mighty empire. 
There were the encircling allies, princely churchmen 
like the Bishop of Basel and the Abbot of Saint Gallen, 
free cities like Geneva and isolated Muhlhausen, kindred 
confederations like Wallis by the young Rhone and the 
Three Leagues by the young Rhine, still sheltering the 
tongue of Rome among the Rsetian hills. But in all 
this busy and shifting drama two points specially con- 
cern us. The League became independent of the Em- 
pire, and it ceased to be purely German. It was shown 
to be practically independent by the end of the fifteenth 
century ; by the Peace of Westfalia its independence was 
formally acknowledged. Then the conquests and alli- 
ances made both by varions cantons and by the con- 
federation itself in the Romance-speaking lands of Bur- 
gundy and Italy, while they left the ruling bodies still 
German, brought a large extent of non-German territory 
within the range of the League. Pre-eminent among 
these lands were the territories on the Italian lakes ceded 
by the dukes of Milan, and the great dominion wrested 
by Bern from the dukes of Savoy, her short-lived con- 
quests south of the Leman lake, her abiding dominion to 
the north of it. On the League thus formed came the 
storm of the French Revolution; the true democracy 
of the mountains stood face to face with the sham 
democracy of the bloody city. Then men stood forth 
to show how nobility in the highest sense could live on 
for ages in commonwealths of either form, handing on 
the great inheritance of illustrious names, names all the 
more illustrious because no titles that kings can give 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 387 

overshadowed their unbroken traditions. Aristocratic 
Bern sent forth her Erlach, democratic Uri sent forth 
her Reding, to do, in all but the accident of success, as 
Erlachs and Redings had done so many ages earlier. 
In the classical cant of the time, the Old League of High 
Germany became a Helvetic republic; the federal tie, 
convicted of the crime of antiquity, was swept away ; 
the patrician of Bern and the landman of Uri, stretched 
and pared to one Procrustean model, found their lands 
degraded from states into departments. At the preach- 
ing of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the eternal 
democracy of the Three Lands ceased for a moment 
to exist. At the bidding of the reformers of Paris, the 
free Teuton was constrained to turn away from fashions 
that were old in the days of Tacitus ; the Rights of 
Man forbade the gatherings of a sovereign people be- 
neath the open canopy of heaven. Yet even in the 
triumph of wrong right had some share. The madness 
that swept away all that was old swept away ancient 
bondage as well as ancient freedom ; the men of Bellin- 
zona and Lausanne became the equals of their ancient 
masters. The card-house of empty theorists fell to the 
ground ; Napoleon Buonaparte had at all events the eye 
of a statesman, and towards the Swiss commonwealths 
he showed a degree of thoughtfulness which he showed 
towards few other lands. He had clearly no mind to deal 
more harshly with them than was needful for the objects 
of his selfish policy. His Act of Mediation undoubt- 
edly gave to such of the confederate, allied, and subject 
lands as escaped French annexation a better general 
constitution than they had ever had before. The old 
communities again rose to the rank of independent 



388 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

states ; but the old distinctions of confederates, allies, 
and subjects, did not revive with them. Allies and sub- 
jects rose to the rank of Confederates. By this means, 
while the Federal character of the Union revived, its 
distinctively German character passed away. Romance 
lands, Burgundian, Italian, Rsetian, stood side by side 
on equal terms with their old German allies and masters. 
An artificial nation was thus formed, a nation not 
marked out by the usual signs of blood or language, 
but still a nation by adoption. But it is adoption with- 
out assimilation. The Lombard of Ticino, the Bur- 
gundian of Vaud, has been raised to the level of his 
former German masters, but he has not adopted their 
tongue, neither have they adopted his. In your Union 
you adopt citizens from all parts, but what you adopt 
you assimilate, wherever the physical laws of nature 
allow of assimilation. All, sooner or later, are merged 
in one body ; all become members of what I venture 
still to call the English people. To you the sight must 
seem strange to see two states of the same union side 
by side, speaking wholly distinct languages ; it must 
seem yet more strange to you to find one state all but 
wholly Catholic, another all but wholly Protestant, and 
to learn that the laws which in either case secure civil 
equality to the minority are in most cantons of recent 
date. Yet, with all this diversity, the Swiss people, Teu- 
tonic and Romance, Catholic and Protestant, undoubt- 
edly forms a nation, though a nation artificially put 
together out of fragments of three elder nations. That 
nation needed a name, and, at the reconstruction of 
the Confederation after the general European war the 
name which had been in popular use for more than three 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 389 

centuries came into formal use also. The Swiss Con- 
federation of twenty-two cantons — now practically of 
twenty-five — began its renewed course. The federal 
tie was lax : the governments of many cantons were 
oligarchic. Local revolutions upset the oligarchies; 
a civil war, not. without points of likeness to the civil 
war among your own States, led to a general recon- 
struction of the federal system. The constitution of 
1848, the parallel of your constitution sixty years ear- 
lier, began a new order of things, which, with some 
lesser changes, is still in vigorous being. 

In one sense it is needless to show that the Swiss 
Confederation is older than the American ; in another 
sense the American Confederation is older than the 
Swiss. Your first articles of confederation are nearly 
five hundred years younger than the first recorded 
alliance of the Three Lands ; they are more than two 
hundred and fifty years younger than the full establish- 
lishment of the Thirteen Cities and Lands. And the 
Thirteen cities and lands were undoubtedly before the 
eyes of those who framed the first laxer union of the 
Thirteen colonies which had just grown into thirteen 
free and independent States. But it is yet clearer that 
the "more perfect union" established by the later federal 
constitution of America was before the eyes of those who 
established the more perfect union of the Swiss federal con- 
stitution. Like wise men, they adopted whatever in your 
constitution suited their circumstances and traditions; 
like wise men too, they did not blindly transplant things 
which had naturally sprung from the circumstances and 
traditions of America, but which did not suit the cir- 
cumstances and traditions of Switzerland. The two 



390 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

houses of their federal assembly are modelled exactly 
on the pattern of the two houses of your Congress. 
The Senate, representatives of the States, reappears in 
the Standerath, or Conseil des Etats y to which each can- 
ton, great and small, sends two members. The House 
of Representatives, representing the whole federal na- 
tion, reappears in the Nationalrath or Conseil National, 
to which each canton sends a greater or less number 
strictly apportioned to its population. But, as I have 
already implied, the form of the Swiss executive wholly 
departs from yours. I venture to think that it departs 
from yours far more widely than yours departs from 
ours. The change from King to President seems to 
me a much slighter change than the change from 
the President to the Bundesrath or Conseil Federal, 
Such powers as the Swiss constitution gives to its 
executive, powers far less than those of either King 
or President, are entrusted to a council of seven. Of 
that council the so-called Bundesprdsident } or President 
of the Confederation, is simply chairman. He is not 
President in the same sense as the President of the 
United States. He is not personally an element in the 
commonwealth, holding important powers in his own 
hands. The nearest approach — and a very distant 
approach it is — to either King or President which 
the Swiss system allows is found in the Federal Coun- 
cil as a whole. And here to my mind comes in the 
great virtue of the Swiss system. I hold that the 
great advantage of our practical republic over your 
avowed republic — an advantage purchased by some 
disadvantages — is the power of changing the actual ruler 
at any moment, while you must keep the chief magis- 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 39 1 

trate once chosen till the end of a fixed term. This last 
difficulty seems inherent in any republican form of gov- 
ernment ; but the Swiss seem to me to have cut down 
that difficulty almost to a vanishing point. Under their 
system there is less likelihood of the nation wishing to 
get rid of its actual chiefs than under any other. There 
is more chance than under any other system of the 
executive and legislative branches of the government 
living together in unity. The first act of each federal 
Assembly is to choose the federal executive for the term 
of its own life ; that is, for a term of three years. The 
greatest chance of harmony between the two branches 
is thus gained. The executive and legislative branches 
are in constant intercourse with one another. And, as 
we have seen, through the power of the members of the 
Federal Council to attend and speak in either house, 
the Swiss Assembly can therefore hear, while the Amer- 
ican Congress cannot hear, what in England we call 
a ministerial statement. Nothing again is more com- 
mon than for the Assembly, when any question comes 
up for discussion, to ask the federal Council to put 
it before them in the shape of a definite bill which 
they may discuss and vote upon. No system seems 
to me to be better devised as a mere political ma- 
chine, and to my mind at least the Federal Council 
has certain incidental advantages above kings or presi- 
dents either. You cannot turn a council of seven men 
into an object of social worship ; and the election by 
the Assembly gets rid of what I confess seems to be 
a weakness in your American system. The founders 
of your constitution, less far-sighted on that point than 
on most others, meant the President to be chosen by 



392 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

wise men specially picked out for that purpose. As it 
is, he is practically chosen by the people, but with the 
modification that he may happen not to be the real 
choice of a majority of the people. 

On the other hand, the Swiss system lacks two points 
which I have always looked on as among the wisest in 
yours. I mean the great position held by your Supreme 
federal Court, and those special powers which are held 
by the Senate, and which are not shared by the other 
branch of the federal legislature. In the Swiss consti- 
tution of 1848 the great deficiency was on the side of 
the federal judiciary. Later constitutional amendments 
have in some measure remedied this fault; but there 
is still nothing in Switzerland at all like that great tri- 
bunal which can judge between State and State and 
can declare an act of the combined three powers of the 
Union to be null and void. The special powers of the 
Senate seem to me to be wise on this ground. In any 
constitution which has two houses and an executive, the 
" other house," be its title Senate, House of Lords, or 
any other, is in its own nature the weakest of the three. 
There must be some kind of executive, some kind of 
popular assembly; men may propose to change the 
form of either, but no one will propose wholly to get 
rid of either. But the "other house" is something 
much less obvious ; it is something artificial, some might 
say something purely ornamental. The British House 
of Lords rests on its traditional dignity; the American 
Senate rests on its absolute necessity for the full carry- 
ing out of the federal idea. But the Senates of other 
lands have, in every revolution, been the first elements 
of the state to give way. Even here in the United 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 393 

States, though a little thought will show that the Senate 
is absolutely necessary, yet it needs that little thought 
to see the necessity ; it is not so simply obvious at the 
first glance as the necessity for some House of Repre- 
sentatives and for some kind of executive, whether in 
the shape of a President or in any other. It was there- 
fore a great stroke of wisdom to give the Senate a spe- 
cial stability by making it something more than a branch 
of the Legislature, by vesting in it certain powers in 
which* the other branch of the Legislature does not 
share. The Swiss Standerath has not those special 
powers ; the simpler relations of the three elements in 
the Swiss system, the greater power vested in the Fed- 
eral Assembly as a whole, perhaps hardly allowed it to 
hold quite the same position as your Senate. But it is 
a fact to be remembered that the abolition of the Stan- 
derath has been proposed, and proposed within the walls 
of the Federal Assembly. The proposal indeed met 
with no support, but it is an instructive fact that it 
should ever have been made. 

I have used some freedom in speaking of the working 
of political institutions of which, as matters of every-day 
experience, every man here present must have more 
knowledge than myself. Yet there may be something 
to learn from the light in which these things seem to an 
outsider who has made political constitutions a study, 
and who has certainly given some special heed to the 
constitution of the United States. I have always looked 
on both what I may call the conscious and what I may 
call the unconscious side of that constitution with spe- 
cial interest. Looking at it from my point of view, as a 



394 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

political study, there is something very instructive, some- 
thing especially instructive for the immediate purpose of 
these lectures, in both those sides. Wherever the found- 
ers of the constitution preserved the institutions of the 
older England, there was conscious reflexion. Wherever 
the needs of the case caused them to fall back on uncon- 
scious reproduction of the institutions of times long past, 
there was the working of my pet rule that like causes 
produce like effects. They strove to preserve the tradi- 
tions of English kingship, so far as they were consistent 
with the changed circumstances in which they found 
themselves. In so doing they unwittingly lighted on a 
lively image of the old Achaian generalship. From my 
point of view the reproduction is all the more valuable 
because it was unwitting. If the founders of your con- 
stitutions had been, like the founders of some other 
constitutions, theorists cumbered with more learning 
than was good for them, your institutions might have 
been crowded, like the institutions of some other lands, 
with grotesque imitations of inapplicable models, with 
grotesque misapplications of misunderstood names and 
phrases. I speak of political, not of local nomenclature. 
You have none of the follies of France, no Councils of 
Ancients, no Prefects, no Consuls, best of all, no Em- 
perors. I might perhaps wish that, with so many good 
Teutonic names to choose from, the meeting-place of 
your Union had been called by some other name than 
that of the Roman Capitol. It is some comfort, on the 
other hand, that the man whom you all reverence, your 
first general, your first chief magistrate, bore a good 
Teutonic surname, and gave to your federal capital a 
sterling English name, the name of an English gens 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 395 

which had ages before fenced in the town of the Was- 
cingas on British ground. Yet on the other I may 
wonder why, if one of the heroes of old Rome was to 
be canonized, Licinius and the Gracchi were left out 
in the cold, while an order and a great city received 
the name of a fierce and stubborn oligarch like Lucius 
Quinctius Cincinnatus. But things like these are mere 
trifles compared with the essentially wise and essentially 
conservative spirit of the founders of your common- 
wealth ; and it is certainly not by virtue of any article 
of the federal constitution that either the Capitol or the 
city of Cincinnati bears its name. The founders of your 
commonwealth were not great scholars. They had the 
wisdom to see that the records of past times were worth 
searching into, but they had not enough of acquired 
learning always to guide them aright as to matters of facts 
when searching into those records. This was not very 
wonderful in an age when the single mind of Gibbon 
seemed to have absorbed into itself the stock of know- 
ledge that was meant for the whole century. Nor do I be- 
lieve that their deficiencies in minute historical scholar- 
ship did them any harm. At all events, whenever they 
did stumble on any reproduction of ancient institutions, 
it made such reproduction the more valuable, because it 
was unwitting. If, in paring down a king into a presi- 
dent, they did just what Athens and Rome had done 
before them, if the result was the erection on American 
soil of a lively image of Aratos and Philopoimen, the 
likeness is all the more precious because its authors did 
not know exactly what they were doing. It causes us 
more ground for musing, perhaps even some ground for 
regret, that they seem not to have fully understood the 



396 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

working of their own century in Great Britain, and not 
to have fully grasped the relations which even then 
existed between a King of Great Britain and his chief 
minister. Anyhow, either the British or the American 
form of executive is better than the odd confusion of 
the two which passes for a republican magistracy in the 
eyes of the ingenious people of France. 

I have thus said what I have to say of the federal 
constitutions of America and of Switzerland. To my 
mind, those two constitutions seem two of the most me- 
morable works of man's wisdom. They show that man's 
political faculties are not deadened, that the men of the 
eighteenth century and of the nineteenth could do as 
much for the advancement of freedom and good govern- 
ment, and could do it in as wise a way, as the men of 
any earlier age. What I see in England, in America, in 
Switzerland, is stability, the power to make changes, 
when change is needed, without pulling the whole 
political fabric down on the heads of the reformers. 
Your constitution above all has gone through the 
most frightful of trials, and it has stood the test. I 
remember twenty years ago how shallow people were 
crying out that the principle of a federal system was 
proved to be worthless because certain members of a 
particular confederation wished to separate from it. 
I can only suppose that they fancied that no revolts, 
no separations, no dismemberments, had ever taken 
place in lands governed by kings. The retort is so 
obvious that I need hardly point out that the recent 
experience of Greece, of Belgium, of Poland, of Lom- 
bardy, of Sicily, of half a dozen European lands, proved 
at least as much against monarchy as the secession of 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 397 

the Southern states proved against federalism. At all 
events, they did not stop to think that, after all, they 
were only backing up one federal commonwealth against 
another. They must have shut their eyes to the fact 
that the Southern Confederacy, in its short-lived consti- 
tution, re-enacted all the essential features of the consti- 
tution of the United States. That fact is one which I 
should turn about another way. I can conceive no more 
speaking tribute to the wisdom of any political system 
than the fact that the men who were most dissatis- 
fied with its actual administration, the men who were 
most anxious to escape from its actual fellowship, of 
set purpose re-enacted its chief provisions for their own 
separate use. 

In looking back again to our earlier subject of this 
evening, to the historic relations of England and her 
great Western colony, I must above all things, as a man 
of the older England, rejoice, as every man of the older 
England should rejoice, in the greatness of the newer 
England beyond the Ocean which men went out from 
his own land to found. It is something to see the insti- 
tutions of England copied, successfully or unsuccess- 
fully, by men of other races and other tongues. But it 
is far more to see the first place in a vast continent held 
by a mighty commonwealth founded by men of the Eng- 
lish stock, not borrowing — for men do not borrow what 
is their own — but carrying on as their own heritage, 
developing, expanding, adapting to new circumstances, 
the institutions of the elder land. I have been present 
at local elections in more than one State of your Union. 
Those elections were a study in institutions, and some- 

26 



398 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

thing more than a mere study of institutions. I marked 
how some offices still bore the ancient English names 
and pretty much the ancient English functions. There 
was the immemorial Sheriff, the origin of whose office 
is lost in the gloom which gathers round the earliest 
institutions of Angle and Saxon on British ground. 
There was the Coroner, one of the gifts which the wis- 
dom of the great Edward gave to his people. Nor did 
I wonder to find the place of sheriff, as well as the place 
of coroner, bestowed, according to the law of the great 
Edward, by the voice of the people. And if, alongside 
of these ancient English offices, I found some others 
which had grown up on this Western continent, I could 
but say, Here is a people who are not afraid to change 
when change is needed, to devise new things when new 
things are needed, but who cleave to old things, to old 
names, to old offices, if the need of change, the need of 
new devices, is not clearly made out. When I look at 
the great work of your federal constitution, at the whole 
system, so complicated and yet so simple, of your insti- 
tutions, federal, cantonal, local, I feel that it is no small 
matter that it should have been the English folk on a 
new soil which has wrought this great work of later 
times. It is something to hear the English tongue 
spoken as the tongue of so many free commonwealths, 
of so many free commonwealths knit into one free com- 
monwealth, a commonwealth stretching from the Eastern 
Ocean to the Western. And to you I would say, men 
of this younger and vaster England, above all, men of 
this land which boasts itself to be specially New Eng- 
land, never forget whence you came. In the greatness 
of your new Western continent, do not forget the old 



THE ELDER AND THE NEWER ENGLAND. 399 

European island, do not forget the older European 
mainland. Remember that the English folk could 
hardly have made their way to the mainland of Amer- 
ica in the seventeenth century, if they had not made 
their way to the isle of Britain in the fifth. Remember 
that the work of Washington and Hamilton implied the 
earlier work of Earl Simon and King Edward. Re- 
member too that neither Washington nor Simon could 
have had an English people to deliver, that neither the 
settlers of the seventeenth century nor the settlers of 
the fifth could have found an English people to lead 
to new homes, if, in the very childhood of our race, 
Arminius had not kept back the legions of Rome from 
engulfing our earliest home in her universal dominion. 



LECTURE VI. 

Home JTrangplanteir. 

In the present series of discourses we have, under the 
guidance of our wide subject, learned the habit of taking 
bold leaps over no small spaces, both of time and of dis- 
tance. Our subject has been nothing short of the his- 
tory of Europe and of the lands colonized from Europe. 
In other words, it has been the history of the dominion 
and the influence of Rome. The power of Rome, the 
law of Rome, the creed of Rome, have brought no small 
part of the world under their obedience. The sway of 
Christ and Caesar has been from one sea to the other, 
and from the flood unto the world's end. In following 
its track we have had to span the Ocean ; we have had 
to mark the way in which the chief nations of Europe 
have reproduced the tongues, the laws, the arts, of Eu- 
rope, on the soil of this New World ; above all, we have 
had to mark how one group of European settlements, 
the settlements of the English folk, have grown on its 
soil into a second English nation, the peer of the elder 
English nation which still abides in its European home. 
We have spanned the Ocean in the natural course of our 
story; let me now ask you to span the Ocean back again 
— for to me at least it seems to be back again — -if not in 
the natural course of our story, yet in order to give our 
treatment of our general story some faint approach to 

400 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 40 1 

completion. We have said something about the fortunes 
of the Roman Empire, its growth, its divisions, its break- 
up, the powers which arose out of its ruins, the powers 
which arose beyond the bounds of its political rule, but 
not beyond the bounds of its moral influence. But in 
all this we have been dealing with one side only of the 
Eternal City and its dominion. We have been dealing 
wholly, or nearly so, with the Rome of the West, with a 
dominion and an influence whose centre was the local 
Rome on the seven hills by the Tiber. But the tale of 
Rome, the tale of Christendom, the tale of European 
civilization, is not fully told, its barest outline is left 
utterly imperfect, unless we cast at least a glance at 
that long and stirring part of the world's history the 
centre of which is the New Rome, the translated Rome, 
the Rome which had moved from the seven hills by the 
Tiber to the seven hills by the Bosporos. I must there- 
fore now, before we finally part, ask you once more to 
span the Ocean with me, and not merely to span the 
Ocean, not merely to land on the native soil of your 
forefathers, but to span Europe in its length and 
breadth. I must ask you to journey on to those fur- 
ther lands of Europe where, in these days of progress, 
Europe is still in bondage to Asia, the civilized man in 
bondage to the barbarian, the follower of Christ to the 
follower of Mahomet, and where the powers of Europe 
still love to have it so. There still abides that " eternal 
Eastern Question" — that epithet given in blind good 
luck by the shallow sneerer who so named it — that eter- 
nal question which was old when the Eternal City was 
not yet, the question which was hardly new in the days 
of Achilleus and Odysseus, the question between the 



402 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

West and the East, between light and darkness, be- 
tween civilization and barbarism, between freedom and 
bondage, in these later ages between Christendom and 
Islam. So old is that question that it seems but as 
yesterday's stage of it when Rome, so to speak, parted 
her being asunder, when her greatest fortress, her 
greatest colony, rather her second self, the New Rome 
of Constantine, arose at the junction of two worlds,. to 
be for eleven hundred years the foremost bulwark of all 
for which man can think it worth to live and die. On 
this side of the history of Rome, that is, on this side 
of the history of the world, I wish specially to insist. 
I wish to insist on it because there is no side of the his- 
tory of the world which has been so unreasonably neg- 
lected and despised, while there is none more important, 
if we are to keep the different parts of the general his- 
tory of the world in their true relation. And, in our 
present way of looking at things, I wish to insist on it 
even more, because there is no part of history in which 
a knowledge of the past is more absolutely necessary 
for the understanding of the present, because there is 
no part in which history is more truly past politics, and 
politics more truly present history. And there is no 
part in which a little wholesome pedantry is more useful, 
no part, that is, where we more need somewhat of care to 
make our thoughts correspond with facts and our words 
correspond with our thoughts. There is no part of the 
world, no part of its history, in which so many have been 
led astray by the use of words which do not answer 
to facts. A crowd of familiar phrases, phrases which 
either in America or in Western Europe have a mean- 
ing, are every day transferred to South-eastern Eu- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 403 

rope, where they either have no meaning at all or 
else an exactly opposite meaning. Above all, the con- 
ventional jargon of diplomacy, misleading everywhere, 
becomes tenfold more misleading in those parts of the 
world. Everywhere does that conventional jargon look 
only to courts and princes and forgets the people ; but 
in South-eastern Europe to look only to courts and 
princes and to forget the people is a tenfold greater 
evil than it is elsewhere. In those lands every one of 
the conventional phrases of diplomatists is a falsehood 
alike as to the present and as to the past. So are many 
of the popular forms of speech which we unconsciously 
transfer from lands where they express facts to lands 
where they express the opposite to facts. Let me go on 
with a few simple illustrations, of all of which, I doubt not, 
I have made use before, but which may be new to some in 
a new place, and which in any case I venture to think will 
bear setting forth more than once. They are good in- 
stances of the way in which lack of pedantry, failure 
that is to make words correspond with thoughts and 
thoughts correspond with facts, leads to utter misap- 
prehension of things both present and past. 

I would first of all ask you to- look at the so-called 
six great powers of Europe, a list by the way in which 
several of the most respectable nations of Europe are left 
out, merely because they do not happen to be so big as 
some of their neighbours. That list takes in five great 
nations. The powers of Great Britain, France, Italy, 
Germany, and Russia are strictly national powers. In 
some of them the power coincides as nearly as is ever 
likely to be possible with a nation in the strictest sense. 
In all of them a nation gives the tone to the power ; the 



404 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

power may fairly pass for the exponent of the will of* a 
particular nation. Of these five again four rank as con- 
stitutional powers, where we may fairly expect that the 
government for the time being speaks the will of the 
people, where, if at any moment it fails to do so, it is 
the people themselves who are to blame. Even in the 
fifth, in despotic Russia, the nation is far from dead, far 
from silent. Though the government of the Russian Em- 
peror is not under the same popular control as the free 
governments of England and France, yet the acts of 
the Emperor do in a general way represent the wishes 
of the Russian people ; he could not venture on any 
course against which the heart of the Russian people 
was steadily set. But there is a sixth power on the list 
which has a wholly different character, and whose pres- 
ence alongside of the five national powers always re- 
minds me of the words of the prophet : " I will provoke 
you to jealousy by them that are no nation." Alongside 
of the five nations stands a mere family estate, a collec- 
tion of odds and ends, a motley gathering of scraps of 
nations, with no interests or feelings in common, whose 
single tie is that this or that lucky marriage, this or that 
piece of military or diplomatic robbery, has brought them 
together as the possession of a single man. Queen Vic- 
toria, President Grevy, King Humbert, the Emperor Wil- 
liam, and the Emperor Alexander, may all be fairly looked 
on as speaking in the name of the several nations of which 
they are severally the chiefs. But Francis Joseph of Lor- 
raine, archduke of Austria, king of Hungary, king, duke, 
count, and lord of endless kingdoms, duchies, counties, 
and lordships, which the. above-mentioned marriages, the 
above-mentioned robberies, have at one time or another 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 405 

brought together, speaks only in the name of his own 
desire to keep all that he has got and to get more if he 
can. I need not tell that he calls himself Emperor of 
Austria ; but you know very well that his right to call 
himself Emperor of Austria because four men of his 
house were chosen Emperors of the Romans is much as 
if a man who has had one or more forefathers Presidents 
of the United States should, on the strength of that fact, 
call himself President of his own private estate. You 
know that he takes as his badge the eagle of the Cae- 
sars ; this is very much as if such a man as I have imag- 
ined should take the stars and stripes as the private 
arms of his family. Now these titles and badges are 
not trifles ; they confound and mislead ; they falsify 
history ; they throw a shadow of antiquity, respectabil- 
ity, and conservatism over a power which is essentially 
modern, upstart, and revolutionary, a power whose mis- 
sion seems to be to wipe out within its range all that is 
ancient and venerable, a power which exists only by 
trampling on every historic right and every national 
memory. Of the six powers this power of Austria, 
Austro-Hungary, or whatever it is to be called, is the 
only one which can be fairly asked to give a reason for its 
existence. The other five speak for themselves. In some 
of them we may wish the form of government to be al- 
tered ; in some of them we may wish the territorial bound- 
aries to be altered ; but no sane person would wish any 
one of the five to cease to exist. For they all are nations ; 
they all have a right to exist as nations. If any of us 
holds that some of the lands belonging to some of these 
powers might well cease to belong them, it is purely on 
the ground that those lands are not really possessions of 



406 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

the nations which form the kernel of those powers. The 
worst enemy of Germany or of Russia could only ask that 
those powers should be made more German, more Rus- 
sian, by taking away from them whatever was not strictly 
German or Russian. But if we take away from the so- 
called Austria whatever is not Austrian, there will be 
mighty little left indeed. A simple Archduke of Austria 
would have his intelligible place. He would take his 
place in the German Federal Council alongside of the 
Duke of Oldenburg and the Prince of Reuss-Schleiz. 
A simple King of Hungary would have an intelligible 
place. He would take his place among the princes of 
South-eastern Europe alongside of the King of the 
Greeks, the King of Roumania, the King of Servia, and 
the Prince of Bulgaria. But, as no historical reason can 
be given why an archduke of Austria and king of Hun- 
gary should call himself Emperor, so no practical reason 
can be given why such an archduke and king should 
reign over the Italian of Trent, the Czech of Prag, the 
/ Pole of Cracow, the Russian of Gallicia, the Rouman of 
Transsilvania, or the Serb of Dalmatia. There is no 
greater case of successful imposture on record ; it 
shows the wonderful way in which names and titles 
become facts and influence events. The barefaced 
stealing of the Imperial title and badge leads people 
to fancy that the so-called Empire of Austria has 
something to do with that Roman. Empire which has 
become wholly a thing of the past, with that ancient 
German kingdom which is not unfairly represented by 
the federal Emperor at Berlin. Or, more truly, men do not 
altogether look on the " Austrian Empire " as being the old 
Roman Empire and German kingdom. They more com- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 407 

monly forget that there ever was a Roman Empire and 
German kingdom, and fancy that there has been an 
" Empire of Austria" from the beginning. Then too 
the habitual and cunning use by an unnational and 
anti-national power of language which is true only 
when applied to a nation tends to make men believe 
that there is an Austrian nation, as there is a French 
or an Italian nation, to believe in short that the power of 
Austria has as good a right to exist as the power of 
France or of Italy. I have heard of " Austrian national 
honour," a thing which cannot exist, because there is no 
Austrian nation. I have heard of the " interests of Aus- 
tria," a phrase which commonly means something dan- 
gerous to free Slaves or free Roumans. I ask what, in 
such a phrase, is meant by " Austria"? Does it mean 
the very respectable German duchy to which alone the 
name of Austria properly belongs ? I do not see how 
its inhabitants can have any interest whatever in doing 
any damage to people who are not so much as their 
neighbours. Or does "Austria" in this phrase mean 
all the lands of which the Archduke of Austria chances 
to be ruler? Of those lands the majority of the inhab- 
itants are themselves Slaves and Roumans, and they as- 
suredly have no interest in furthering the plots of their 
foreign master against their own kinsfolk. The " inter- 
ests of Austria" then mean simply the personal and 
family interests of Archduke Francis Joseph himself. 
But the use of phrases like these tends to mislead peo- 
ple. Talk about the " honour of Austria," the " inter- 
ests of Austria," and the like, makes people think, 
sometimes even unconsciously, that "Austria" is a 
word of the same kind as " France " or " Italy," and 



408 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

that "the interests of Austria" mean something which 
would be for the advantage of some people, nation, or 
language, in some part of the world or other. It is a 
fact that a British traveller, landing in a Dalmatian, that 
is diplomatically an "Austrian," haven, expected to find 
its Slavonic and Italian-speaking inhabitants speaking 
the "Austrian language." He had been always used 
to hear "Austria" spoken of in the same kind of way 
as France and Italy; and he leaped to the conclusion 
that, as there is a French and an Italian language, so 
there must be an "Austrian" language also. 

But let us go on a step further. In the language of 
diplomatists, newspapers, and telegrams, a way of speak- 
ing has come in within my memory which easily lends 
itself to this kind of confusion. The phrase which I 
have already quoted, "the interests of Austria," may- 
pass as a specimen of it, though that form is not quite 
so characteristic of the style as another form, " Austria's 
interests." I mean a fashion of personifying nations, 
powers, and the like, in a way which has always been 
usual in poetry and in rhetorical prose, but which has 
lately become common in the driest and most business- 
like forms of speech. England, France, Germany, any 
other nation or power, is spoken of as if it were a per- 
son which walked and talked and did this and that. 
Now in some phrases this is a mere question of style 
which does not affect facts. Whether we talk of "the 
interests of the French" or of "the interests of France," 
or even, in the newest fashion, of " France's interests," all 
these forms mean exactly the same thing. But let us pass 
to the other end of Europe. Endless confusions, miscon- 
ceptions, misrepresentations, delusions of the most im- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 409 

portant practical kind, have all come out of a mere silly use 
of the one word "Turkey," an use which has come into 
fashion long since my boyhood. If the word " Turkey " 
has any meaning at all, it is an awkward geographical 
name for the still enslaved part of Greece, the still enslaved 
part of Bulgaria, the still enslaved part of Servia, and 
any other lands that still remain in bondage to the Turk. 
It means in short a space on the earth's surface, a space 
happily a good deal smaller now than it was some years 
back. But people see " Turkey " marked on the map, 
as they see France, Germany, Italy, and they fancy that 
" Turkey " is a word of the same meaning as France, 
Germany, and Italy. They think that, as France is the 
land of the French, so " Turkey " is the land of the 
Turks. They think that, as the interests of France and 
the interests of the French are the same thingr so the 
" interests of Turkey " and the " interests of the Turks " 
are the same thing. Or perhaps they do not really think 
so ; if they were examined, they would show that they 
know better ; but they practically think so ; that is, they 
speak and act — for speech, even if it goes no further, is 
action — as if they thought so. And so they help to in- 
crease the general mass of confusion, and, in their de- 
gree, by that invisible influence of each unit of which I 
spoke long ago, to strengthen and prolong a vast mass 
of practical oppression. 

For my own part, I have not for many years used the 
word " Turkey," though newspaper reporters are often 
kind enough to put it into my mouth, sometimes just 
after I have said that I never do use it. I find that I 
can speak of the affairs of South-eastern Europe, even 
of the affairs of the lands which are marked on the map 



410 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

as Turkey — enslaved Greece, enslaved Bulgaria, and the 
rest — without using the misleading word. The word is 
misleading in this way. It makes people fancy that 
Turkey and the Turks stand to each other in the same 
relation as, for instance, Italy and the Italians, whereas 
in truth they stand to each other in an exactly opposite 
relation. Italy is the land of the Italians ; the Italians 
are the people of Italy. But Turkey is not the land of 
the Turks, neither are the Turks the people of Turkey. 
" Turkey " is that extent of territory within which the 
Turks, as foreign oppressors, hold the people of the land 
in bondage in their own land. We hear of " the honour 
of Turkey," "the dignity of Turkey," the "susceptibility 
of Turkey," " the interests of Turkey," " the friends of 
Turkey," " the enemies of Turkey," the " debts of Tur- 
key," or perhaps, in more poetical phrase, " Turkey's 
debt." Now, if these phrases mean anything, they mean 
the exact opposite of what they are designed to mean. 
If by the honour, the dignity, the susceptibility of Tur- 
key, is meant the honour, the dignity, the susceptibility 
of the Turk, I can only say that the Turk has no hon- 
our or dignity, and that his susceptibility does not mat- 
ter. If what is meant is the honour, the dignity, the 
susceptibility, of the people of the lands marked Turkey 
on the map, then I can only say that the presence of the 
Turk in their land keeps them from having any honour 
or dignity, but that . their susceptibility is very strong, 
and that it is most keenly called out by the presence 
of the Turk among them. As for " the interests of Tur- 
key," we again ask what is meant ; for the interests of the 
Turk and the interests of the people of Turkey are the 
two most opposite things in the whole world. The in- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 411 

terest of the Turk is to keep the land called Turkey in 
bondage as long as he can ; the interest of the people 
of Turkey is to free themselves from the bondage of the 
Turk. The phrase " friends of Turkey " commonly 
means the enemies of the people of " Turkey," those 
who would prolong their bondage to the Turk ; and, on the 
other hand, by " enemies of Turkey " is most commonly 
meant people who wish to free Turkey from the Turk's 
oppression. And as for " Turkey's debt," the case is a 
very serious one. I do not mean serious for the bond- 
holders ; never mind them ; I mean that it is a very 
serious case for both the enslaved and the liberated na- 
tions. Diplomatists, bound by the custom of their trade 
to look at words instead of facts, seem to have persuaded 
themselves that " Turkey's debt " is something of the 
same kind as a debt contracted by Great Britain or by 
the United States, by France or Germany or Italy, or 
any other civilized power. Now when the government 
of a civilized power contracts a debt, it presumably con- 
tracts that debt in the interest of the nation which it rep- 
resents. If, as the result of any war or any treaty, part 
of the territory of that power should either become an 
independent power or should be ceded to some other 
power, there is nothing unreasonable in transferring to 
the new administration a proportional share of the debt 
which had been contracted by the old administration. 
But in the case of the Turk we need not say anything 
presumably ; there is no presumption in the matter. We 
know perfectly well why the Turk contracts his debts. 
Every penny which the Turk has borrowed has been 
borrowed for one or other of two purposes. It has been 
borrowed to gratify the personal pleasures, commonly 



412 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

the infamous pleasures, of successive Sultans, to buy 
them slaves or to build them palaces. Or else it has 
been borrowed for military purposes ; that is, it has 
been borrowed to make the Turk better able to hold the 
people of the land called "Turkey" in bondage. When 
Christian men are not ashamed to lend their money for 
such purposes as these, it is well that they should lose it. 
But it is not reasonable that such parts of the people of 
the land as are set free should be saddled with any part of 
the debt which was contracted to hinder them from be- 
coming free. It sounds very neat and diplomatic when 
we read that free Bulgaria or enlarged Montenegro is to 
take upon itself a share of the Turk's debt proportional 
to the extent of the territory ceded by the Turk. What 
is really meant is that the people who have escaped from 
bondage are to be made answerable for debts which were 
contracted by the oppressor from whom they have just 
escaped for the express purpose of keeping them in 
bondage. A more glaring case of injustice cannot be 
conceived. And it all comes out of the diplomatic 
fashion of putting words instead of facts. 

So it is with other phrases in common use. We hear 
of " the Turkish government ;" we hear the Turkish 
Sultan spoken of as the " sovereign " of the people of 
those parts of South-eastern Europe which he still keeps 
under his power. And this " government," this " sov- 
ereign," is held, after the analogy of other governments 
and sovereigns, to have "rights." It is even argued 
that the " subjects " of this " sovereign" owe him some 
kind of duty, perhaps even the duty of " loyalty." Now 
all this kind of talk leads to utter misconceptions and to 
real practical evils. For it is all mere talk, which, has 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 413 

nothing answering to it in the world of fact. If by " gov- 
ernment," "sovereign," "subject," "rights," "loyalty," 
etc., we mean the things which bear those names in 
America or in Western Europe, the words are out of 
place anywhere where the Turk rules, because the things 
do not exist. By " government " we understand an in- 
stitution which serves a great many ends, the chief of 
which are to protect life, property, and other valuable 
things at home, and to speak in the name of the nation 
abroad. If the head of such a government be a prince, an 
emperor, king, or any other, we call him a " sovereign." 
And the people who live under such a government we 
call " subjects " or " citizens," according to its form. 
And such a government undoubtedly has " rights " — 
whatever rights the law of the particular country gives 
it ; the subjects or citizens have undoubted duties 
towards it, the duty of obedience to all the lawful com- 
mands of the ruling authority, whatever may be its 
form. And a government which does its duty, which 
exercises its rights only according to law, will surely 
call forth that feeling of " loyalty," which some people 
seem to think can be called forth only by a prince, but 
which, it seems to me — and I doubt not seems to you 
also — can be no less fully called forth by a common- 
wealth or by its chief. 

In short, in civilized lands the duties of the ruler and 
the subject are reciprocal. The whole thing is of the 
nature of a bargain : lawful obedience is given in return 
for lawful protection, lawful protection is given in return 
for lawful obedience. Now in Western Europe one gov- 
ernment may be better than another, either in the form of 
its constitution or in the character of its administration at 
27 



414 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

any particular moment. But the worst government in 
Western Europe is much better than no government at 
all ; it does on the whole more good than harm ; it may 
be desirable to change its constitution or to reform its 
administration ; it cannot be desirable to sweep it away 
altogether. There must be an English, a French, an 
Italian, a German, and a Russian government, of some 
kind. But we may fairly ask, Need there be a Turkish 
government of any kind ? Or rather we may ask, Is 
there such a thing as a Turkish government? Is not 
the word " government " altogether misapplied to any- 
thing that exists in enslaved Greece, enslaved Bulgaria, 
or any other land where the Turk bears rule ? The 
truth is that there is no government in those lands ; 
there is not even mis-government. There is the opposite 
to government. The business of government is to make 
life and property safe. The so-called Turkish govern- 
ment simply makes life and property unsafe in enslaved 
Greece and enslaved Bulgaria. The business of govern- 
ment is to represent the nation in dealings with other na- 
tions. The so-called Turkish government exists simply 
to hinder the people of enslaved Greece and enslaved 
Bulgaria, not only from having any dealings with other 
nations, but from union with the nations to which 
they ought to belong and to which they are eager to 
belong. In a well-ordered state the government will 
speak the will of the people. The so-called Turkish 
government must, in its very nature, always speak the 
opposite to the will of the people. The sovereign of a 
civilized kingdom is the chief of the nation, the personal 
embodiment of the nation. The Turkish Sultan, the so- 
called sovereign of enslaved Greece and enslaved Bui- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 415 

garia, is not the chief or embodiment of either of those 
nations; he is the foreign enemy who hinders those 
nations from having any national being. Wherever the 
Turk is in power there is no government; the presence of 
the Turk hinders the existence of government. As soon 
as he is turned out, government begins. There is gov- 
ernment, better or worse, but government of some kind, 
in free Greece, free Servia, free Bulgaria. There will be 
government, better or worse, but government of some 
kind, in enslaved Greece, enslaved Servia, enslaved Bul- 
garia, when the Turk is driven out of those lands, but 
not before. 

In short there is no such thing as a Turkish gov- 
ernment. There is, in certain parts of Greece, Bul- 
garia, and some other lands, an organized system of 
foreign oppression which .hinders the existence of 
government. The head of that system of foreign op- 
pression is the Turkish Sultan. But the Turkish Sul- 
tan is not the sovereign of those lands, in the sense 
in which Queen Victoria is the sovereign of Great Brit- 
ain and King Humbert the sovereign of Italy; he is 
the sovereign of those lands only in the sense in which 
a burglar who has broken into a house might be called 
a sovereign of that house. He has no rights, for 
wrong can have no rights, and his whole position is 
the embodiment of wrong. The people of enslaved 
Greece and enslaved Bulgaria are not his subjects 
in the sense in which an Englishman of Britain is a 
subject of Queen Victoria or an Italian a subject of 
King Humbert. The Englishman or the Italian is a 
" subject " only in a sense in which " subject " means the 
same thing as " citizen." But the enslaved Greek, the 



416 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

enslaved Bulgarian, is a subject of the Sultan only in 
the sense in which the lawful owners of the house 
into which the burglar has broken may be said to be 
the subjects of the burglar. They owe him no duties, 
except the duties which orderly citizens owe to burg- 
lars, that is, to hand them over to the police. Only for 
the people of enslaved Greece and enslaved Bulgaria 
there is no police ; they must be their own police ; for 
them there is no law but the law of Mr. Justice Lynch. 
His vigorous arm has already done a good deal of 
justice in those lands; but there is a good deal more 
for him still to do. 

Remember then that all these words, "Turkey," 
" Turkish government," " rights of the Sultan," and the 
like, are mere delusions, words which answer to no 
facts, words which every time they are used tend to 
promote misconceptions and practically to strengthen 
the hands of oppression. I would say, dare to be senti- 
mental ; that is, dare to look at the facts themselves and 
not at the conventional formulae which misrepresent 
them. Dare to be pedantic ; that is, dare to make your 
thoughts answer to the facts, and your words answer to 
your thoughts. Leave misleading phrases to the cun- 
ning people who use them in order to mislead, and to 
the careless people who use them because they will not 
take the trouble to avoid being misled. Above all, do 
not be taken in when any Turk, when any Greek or Ar- 
menian traitor, talks about his " sovereign " and his 
" country." There is his Excellency Musurus Pasha, 
Ambassador from the Grand Turk to the court of Great 
Britain. He talked big at a Lord Mayor's dinner about 
his " august sovereign " and his " Ottoman fatherland." 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 417 

That means that he is hired by the Turk, with gold 
which the Turk wrings from Greek and Bulgarian 
households, to do all that his Greek subtlety can do to 
prolong the oppression of his own people and to patch 
up the tottering throne of their oppressor. And there 
is the more famous Midhat, whether the assassin of 
Abd-ul-aziz or not matters very little — in any case the 
assassin of countless Bulgarian lives, the dishonourer of 
countless Bulgarian homes, the man who planned those 
deeds of Batak over which Lord Beaconsfield jested so 
merrily, and who, crowned with such merits as these, 
naturally became the cherished guest of the polite so- 
ciety of London. Midhat too could talk at a public 
dinner about " my country." Where Midhat's real 
country may be, from what corner he or his father may 
have been first imported as slave or minion, it is not 
very important to inquire. But when Midhat applies 
the words " my country " to any spot of Christian soil, 
he can mean " my country " only in the sense in which 
a master of fox-hounds talks of " my country." He 
can mean only that space on the map which furnishes 
him with victims. 

Now at this stage some one may perhaps put in a 
very common cavil. I am quite prepared to be told that 
the rule of the Turk in South-eastern Europe is simply 
a case of a very common class, a case of a government 
which had its origin in conquest. I am prepared to be 
told that there have been and still are many governments 
of that class, and that, however wrongful they have been 
in their beginning, they are legitimated by time. I have 
often heard the question, If five hundred years of un- 
broken possession does not legitimate a government, 



41 8 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

what can legitimate it ? Now when I put the question 
in this shape, and make the gainsayer talk about " five 
hundred years," I am paying the gainsayer a compliment 
which he is not likely to deserve. He is a great deal 
more likely to say "four hundred years" than " five 
hundred ;" that is, he is likely to think that the taking 
of Constantinople was the beginning of Ottoman con- 
quest in Europe instead of its crown. But let us ex- 
amine the answer as an answer. No doubt there are 
many governments in the world which began in con- 
quest, but which lapse of time has made legitimate ; and 
we may add that, in most cases, they have become legit- 
imate in a much shorter space of time than five hun- 
dred years. But the truth is that space of time has 
nothing to do with the matter. A government founded 
on conquest may become thoroughly legitimate on the 
morrow of the conquest ; it may remain utterly illegiti- 
mate five hundred years after it. Now, looked at by this 
rule the Ottoman power in Europe, whether it has lasted, 
as it has in different parts, five hundred and thirty years 
or only a little over sixty years, is in either case a thing 
as wrongful as it was when the conquest began. The 
rule of the conqueror is unlawful as long as it remains 
the rule of a conqueror ; it becomes lawful as soon as it 
becomes a national government. If the conqueror, from 
the morrow of his conquest, makes himself one with 
the people whom he has conquered, if he makes him- 
self really their national head, if he gives them as good 
protection as a native ruler could give them, then his 
rule, if wrongful on the day of conquest, becomes right- 
ful on the morrow. At whatever time, sooner or later, 
the conquered can look to their conqueror or his sue- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 419 

cessor as truly the chief of their nation, giving them the 
benefits of a national government, at that time, whether 
sooner or later, the government founded on conquest is 
legitimated. It becomes legitimate whenever it really 
becomes a government. But the rule of the Turk has 
never become a government; it has never discharged 
the duties of government ; it was foreign brigandage 
five hundred years back, and it remains foreign brigand- 
age still. There is in truth a good deal of difference 
between the rule of the Turk now and the rule of the 
Turk five hundred years back. But the difference is 
this, that the rule of the Turk is even further from our 
definition of a government, that it is more distinctly or- 
ganized brigandage and nothing else, now that it has 
lasted five hundred years than it was at the time when 
it began. 

Akin to this is another fallacy. When we speak of 
any particular evil doings of the Turk, we are told that 
Christian rulers, Christian nations, have done things 
just as bad. And, as a matter of fact, this is perfectly 
true ; the falsehood lies in the inference. I have little 
doubt that for every one of the worst deeds of the Turk 
we could find a parallel in some deed of some Christian 
power or other. But what then ? The Christian powers 
have reformed, while the Turk, so far as he has changed 
at all, has changed only by getting worse. If we look 
back five hundred years or one hundred years or fifty 
years or any smaller number of years, we shall find that 
all Western governments have improved, while the 
Turk alone has gone back. Perhaps every govern- 
ment in the world still needs reform : my point is that 
even those Western governments which we may think 



420 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

still stand in need of most reform have positively re- 
formed a great deal. The Turk has not reformed, be- 
cause from the nature of his religion he cannot reform. 
And a government, like most other things, if it fails to 
become better, commonly becomes worse. It has been 
often said that the Hungarians were better off while 
they were under the Turkish Sultans than they were 
restored to the rule of their Austrian kings. I am 
no lover of Austrian kings; but I must do them jus- 
tice in this matter. I have no doubt that, as regards 
the Protestants of Hungary at the actual time of the 
deliverance of Hungary from the Turk, the saying 
is strictly true. That deliverance was very little of 
a deliverance for them. The Turkish Sultans, though 
in the nature of things oppressors of men of other 
religions, were not, and hardly could be, persecu- 
tors in the strictest sense. The Austrian King of 
Hungary at the time of the deliverance was a per- 
secutor in the strictest sense. But it is quite certain 
that, for a long time past, no Hungarian Protestant 
would have bettered his condition by becoming a 
rayah — a Christian subject — of the Turk. So an Eng- 
lish Protestant in the reign of Mary, an English Roman 
Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth, would certainly have 
been better off as a rayah under Suleiman the Lawgiver; 
so would a French Protestant or a Genevese Catholic at 
a much later time. I need not insult you by telling you 
that things have become widely different in all these 
lands. We are used to look upon Spain as a backward 
country, as one of the most backward countries in 
Europe. We ever and anon hear stories about religious 
intolerance in Spain. A Spanish Protestant is subjected 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 42 1 

by law to vexatious restrictions on the public exercise 
of his religion, and, as usual, when the letter of the law 
is bad, its administration is worse than its letter. Now 
the sooner all such restrictions are abolished the better ; 
but let us do justice to Spain also. A hundred years 
back a Spanish Protestant would undoubtedly have been 
better off as a rayah of the Turk. In Spain a hundred 
years back we could not have said that a Protestant was 
subject to vexatious restrictions on the public exercise 
of his religion, for any attempt at the public exercise of 
his religion would have been impossible. He would 
have run a great risk of being burned alive for its most 
private profession or confession. As a rayah of the 
Turk, he would have been liable to great oppression in 
many ways, but he would have been in no danger of 
being put to death either for the profession of his re- 
ligion or for its public exercise. The Jews of Spain 
bettered themselves by migrating to the dominions of 
the Turk, and the Protestants of Spain, if there had been 
any considerable number of them, would have bettered 
themselves by migrating with them. But assuredly a 
Spanish Protestant would not better himself now by 
such a migration. He has still something to complain 
of; but the greatest ground of complaint is removed. 
Not only is his life safe, but he is, what as a rayah of 
the Turk he would not be, the civil equal of his neigh- 
bours of the dominant religion. That is to say, even 
Spain, which has still much to reform, has actually re- 
formed a great deal. But the Turk meanwhile has not 
reformed, but has, if anything, got worse. It is per- 
fectly true that Christian governments and Christian na- 
tions have in times past done things as bad as the worst 



422 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

deeds of the Turk. But they have left off doing them, 
while the Turk goes on doing them still. The worst 
Christian governments can reform, and they have re- 
formed. But experience shows that the Turk never has 
reformed, and reason, arguing from experience, will tell 
us that the Turk never can reform. 

Now what is the cause of this marked difference be- 
tween Eastern and Western Europe ? Why is it that 
in Western Europe government is on the whole a good 
thing, that at the very worst it is misgovernment, the 
abuse of a good thing, but that in Eastern Europe, in 
all those lands which have not been as yet set free from 
the Turk, that which is conventionally called " govern- 
ment " is neither a good thing nor even the abuse of a 
good thing, but a thing purely evil ? Why in short, is it, 
not government nor even misgovernment, but the direct 
opposite to government ? Why again cannot the Turk 
reform, while the worst Christian governments can re- 
form and have reformed ? The causes for this difference 
lie down very deep in the history of the South-eastern 
lands. They are indeed mainly to be found in the spe- 
cial circumstances of Mahometan conquest. But, fully 
to grasp them, we must go back many ages earlier than 
Mahometan conquest in the South-eastern lands, many 
ages earlier than the beginnings of Mahometan conquest 
in any lands. The immediate cause of the difference is 
that the so-called " Turkish government " is the rule of 
a Mahometan master over subjects of another religion, 
in this case over subjects of one of the forms of the 
Christian religion. Now it is certain that Mahometan 
rule over men of another religion can never be govern- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 423 

ment in the truer and better sense of the word. In such 
a case we may lay aside all talk about political rights, 
about parliaments, constitutions, and the like ; no Ma- 
hometan ruler can really give ordinary civil rights to his 
subjects who are not of the Mahometan religion. He 
cannot give them that protection against wrong, that 
redress when wrong has been done, which among civ- 
ilized nations is looked for no less from a despotic than 
from a constitutional government. The Turk cannot 
give them that protection, because the first principles of 
his religion forbid him to give it to them. A Mahometan 
government is not bound to be persecuting in the strict 
sense, or rather it is bound not to be persecuting. While 
the denial of Christianity, or its profession in some form 
other than the dominant form, has often been punished 
with death in Christian countries, the simple profession 
of Christianity never has been, and according to the 
principles of the Mahometan religion cannot be, treated 
in any Mahometan land as a capital crime. The first 
principle of Mahometan rule is that the Mahometan is 
to fight against men of other religions till they submit, 
but that, by submission and tribute, they purchase the 
right to their lives, their property, and the free exercise 
of their religion. The Christian subjects of a Mussul- 
man ruler are thus condemned in their own land to the 
condition of a subject and degraded class ; but they are 
not, strictly speaking, persecuted, in the sense in which 
Christians of one sect have often been persecuted by 
Christians of another. Righteous expounders of the 
Mahometan law have often stepped in to hinder Mahom- 
etan princes from dealing worse with their Christian sub- 
jects than the Mahometan law ordains. In the days of 



424 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Sultan Selim, and again in the days of Sultan Mahmoud, 
within the lifetime of many of us, the heads of the Ma- 
hometan law— all honour to them for so doing— stepped 
in to hinder wholesale massacres of Christians. But if the 
Christian or other non-Mussulman subject of a Mussul- 
man power is not strictly persecuted, he is oppressed and 
degraded. He is a bondman in his own land ; he buys 
his life and all that he has by payment of tribute to 
foreign masters. And the Mahometan law hinders him 
from having any real security even for that which the 
Mahometan law promises to him. For his oath is not 
taken against a Mussulman wrong-doer. That is to say, 
every Christian is practically at the mercy of every Mus- 
sulman. His legal condition is bad enough ; his prac- 
tical condition is worse. This is what always happens ; 
if the letter of the law condemns a certain class of peo- 
ple to a certain measure of oppression and degradation, 
the practical working of the law will always be worse 
than its letter. The only exception will be when mem- 
bers of the oppressed class can obtain personal relief 
through bribery or personal favour. In this way, while 
most Christians under Mussulman rule have been worse 
off than the Mussulman law ordained, particular persons 
and classes have often been better off. But there never 
has been, and never can be, any real reform under Ma- 
hometan rule. Of course I do not mean that Mahome- 
tan rule cannot be better and worse in different times 
and places. At the present moment, in Constantinople 
and other great cities, where the eyes of Europeans are 
upon him, the Turk does not dare to do such mon- 
strous particular acts as were constantly done a hundred 
or even fifty years back. But in the back parts of Ma- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 425 

cedonia, in the lands which Lord Salisbury rejoiced that 
he had given back to Turkish rule, the general oppres- 
sion, done out of European sight, is undoubtedly greater 
than it was a hundred or five hundred years back. There, 
if things could go back to what they were in the days 
of the first Sultans, it would undoubtedly be a change 
for the better. But real reform, such as we should un- 
derstand by reform in America or in Western Europe, 
there never can be. For the principles of the Mahome- 
tan religion forbid what we understand by real reform ; 
they forbid the putting of the Christian on a real level 
with his Mussulman neighbour. There has been no 
moment when revolt against his Mussulman lord has 
not been the right of every Christian subject. There 
has been no moment when revolt, if only there was any 
hope of success, has not been the duty of every Christian 
subject. The Englishmen of other days, your common 
forefathers and mine, revolted against the yoke of kings 
of their own people in their own land. Englishmen of 
later days, your own immediate forefathers, revolted 
against the yoke of a king of their own people in 
another land. We do not commonly blame either of them 
for so revolting. Yet, judged by the standard of South- 
eastern Europe, they had but small grounds for revolt. 
Wherever the Turk rules, wherever any Mussulman power 
rules over men who are not of the Mussulman religion, 
the rule of George the Third, of Charles the First, of 
Henry the Third, might be welcomed as a happy deliv- 
erance. The people of enslaved Macedonia, enslaved 
by order of Lord Salisbury when the Russian sword had 
won their freedom, would hardly lose by exchanging the 
rule of Abd-ul-Hamid for the rule of John or William 



426 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Rufus. The doom of the South-eastern lands has been 
the nineteen winters of the anarchy of Stephen pro- 
longed for five hundred years. 

But, even without the presence of a Mahometan 
power in the land, in the days before any Mahom- 
etan power was in being, the state of things in South- 
eastern Europe, in the Eastern-Roman Empire and in 
the lands bordering on it, was widely different from any- 
thing that was ever seen in Western Europe. Mussul- 
man rule has in truth continued and strengthened cer- 
tain tendencies which are already at work, and which in 
a very marked way distinguish the history of the Eastern 
Empire from that of the Western. One special feature of 
the South-eastern lands has ever been the permanence of 
races, as contrasted with the way in which, in Western 
Europe, races have been in some cases assimilated and 
in some cases mixed. Not but that there has been a 
large amount of assimilation in Eastern Europe also. 
The Bulgarian has for ages past been Bulgarian only in 
the sense in which the Romanized Celt of Gaul has 
given himself and his land the name of his Frankish 
master, in the sense in which the Slave of Kief and 
Moscow has given himself and his land the name of his 
Russian — that is, his Scandinavian — master. The Bul- 
garians have for ages been a Slavonic people who have 
taken the name of their conquerors, the old Bulgarians of 
Finnish race. The conquered people thoroughly assimil- 
ated the foreign infusion, and the conquest has in no way 
affected the essentially Slavonic character of the modern 
Bulgarian nation. Still it has made a marked distinction 
between them and their Servian fellows, who have assim- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 427 

ilated no such foreign element, and who must come as 
near to being purely Slavonic as any people can come to 
being purely anything. So again, the various processes 
of old Greek colonization, of Macedonian conquest, of 
East-Roman dominion, have, from the very beginning 
of recorded history, spread the Greek name, the Greek 
tongue, Greek -civilization, over millions of men who 
were not Greek by birth. At the present moment the 
best definition of the Greek nation would be to say that 
it takes in all who speak the Greek tongue and belong 
to the Orthodox Church. So again the Ottoman Turks, so 
far as they can be called a nation at all, are most strictly 
an artificial nation. It is not merely that the Sultans 
and other chief men have ever been the sons of 
foreign slave-mothers, the Ottoman caste or army — for 
it is either of those rather than a people — has ever been 
largely recruited by renegades of all nations. The 
Janissaries, while they kept their first strength — that 
strength which made the Ottoman power what it was — 
were all kidnapped Christian children. In the most 
flourishing days of the Ottoman power the great mass 
of the holders of high office were renegades or sons of 
renegades ; the native Turk lay almost under a ban. 
These facts go largely to explain the advance of the 
Ottomans while they drew into their ranks the best 
strength of the conquered nations ; but it shows how 
far they were from being themselves a nation in any 
strict sense. Yet, notwithstanding these facts, the per- 
manence of race is the rule in those days, and the Otto- 
mans themselves are an example of it. There was a 
genuine Turkish kernel, round which the other elements 
have gathered and from which they have received their 



428 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

character. The Ottomans, if not to be called in strict- 
ness a nation or a people, are yet a very strongly marked 
company, strongly marked off, not only from their 
Christian subjects, but from other Mussulmans and even 
from other Turks. 

Now in this the Ottomans have simply conformed to 
the general law of the lands into which they have thrust 
themselves. All the races of those lands, all the nations 
which were there when we get our first glimpses of 
recorded history, all the nations which have in later 
times settled in those lands in such numbers as really to 
form nations, still abide as distinct nations. This is a 
marked contrast to the state of things in Western 
Europe. There, within the lands which formed part of 
the Roman Empire, the races earlier than the Roman 
occupation survive only in remote corners. They sur- 
vive as fragments which for the most part are without 
political importance, and which cannot pretend to any 
distinct national being. The primaeval Basque, at least 
on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, may perhaps claim 
a higher position ; but the Briton, whether in his own 
island or in Gaul, can hardly pretend to a strictly na- 
tional life. Still keeping a marked distinction in other 
ways, he has, for all political purposes, become one with 
his English or French neighbours, and a separation of 
Wales from England or of Britanny from France would 
assuredly be a scheme lying quite beyond the range of 
practical politics. In the rest of Southern Britain, the 
Teutonic settlers, either exterminating or assimilating 
every alien element, abide in the form of the English 
people. In Gaul, so far as Gaul has accepted the fellow- 
ship of Paris, we cannot say that either extermination or 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 429 

assimilation has taken place; the original Celts, the^ 
Roman and the Teutonic conquerors, have more truly 
coalesced to form a new and distinct whole, a nation dis- 
tinct from either of its three component elements, the 
great nation of the French. We smile at the idea of a 
journey through a few English shires, and finding here 
a British settlement, here one of Saxons or Angles, here 
one of Danes, here one of Normans, here one of later 
settlers, Flemings, Huguenots, Palatines, each keeping 
its national being, its national name, its national tongue, 
each perhaps distinguished from its neighbours by the 
profession of a separate religion. We smile no less at 
the idea that a like journey through a few French depart- 
ments might reveal the existence side by side of settle- 
ments of Celts, Romans, Franks, perhaps Scandinavian 
Normans, each keeping its distinctive nationality un- 
touched. But what seems an absurdity even to think of 
in Western Europe is the living reality of the East. There 
all the earlier races, all the later settlers, still exist as dis- 
tinct nationalities, and there are districts in which several 
of them may actually be found as distinct settlements 
side by side in the way of which the very thought 
sounds so grotesque in Western Europe. The three 
races which the Roman conqueror found in the South- 
eastern lands are still there in their distinct national 
being, still there in all the strength of an abiding and 
regenerate national life. The great Thracian race, veiled 
under the Roman name, speaking a Roman tongue, 
abides alike in its scattered settlements in more south- 
ern lands and in its great colony beyond the Dan- 
ube. It abides in both to show how deep was the 
impress which Rome and her speech made on the 

28 



430 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

South-eastern lands. The new-born kingdom of Rou- 
mania, the only European power to which the Roman 
name still cleaves, may claim to be a more direct repre- 
sentative of the Western Rome than the other new-born 
kingdom which has the Western Rome for its capital. 

o 

West-Roman in speech, East-Roman in creed, the Rou- 
man people form one of the ties between the Eastern 
and the Western lands. So, in another way, are the 
other people who for many ages cast away their own 
name for the name of Rome, but, who in casting away 
their name, never cast away the precious heritage of the 
most perfect form of the speech of man. The Greeks, 
Hellenes of old on their own lips and now Hellenes 
again, were for ages content to bear the Roman name, 
and to claim that name as their exclusive possession. On 
the Greek fell the mantle of the Eastern Caesars, as the 
mantle of the Western Caesars fell on the German. 
That the Greek still lives, keeping the tongue of his 
fathers, restored to the name of his fathers ; that he is 
still in many things the foremost among the nations 
of the South-eastern lands, I need not stop to show. 
And his ruder kinsman and neighbour, the Albanian, 
the Skipetar, the remnant of the old Illyrian stock, still 
abides among all changes as a vigorous and self-assert- 
ing folk, keeping a very distinct national being. Divided 
in religion, Latin, Orthodox, Mussulman, brought under 
Italian influences at one end and under Greek influences 
at the other, brought under as full subjection to the 
Turk as such a people could be brought into subjection 
to any rule, still speaking the ancient tongue of days 
before Rome had spanned the Hadriatic, the Albanian, 
as he never became Roman, as in his own land he 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 43 1 

never became Greek, so even, in accepting the creed 
of his Ottoman conqueror, never became Turkish. He 
still abides, the most unchanged representative of the 
ancient folk of the South-eastern lands. He abides as 
a relic of days before Illyrian pirates drew on them the 
vengeance of the mighty commonwealth on the other 
side of Hadria, and thereby opened a path for Rome her- 
self, hardly in a figure, to move to the shores of the 
Bosporos. 

Such are the three primitive races of the land, still 
keeping each one its national life, two of them keeping 
their ancient tongues. And, along with the nations 
which were there before the Roman came, we see too 
the nations which have come in since the establishment 
of the Roman power, the nations which came to under- 
mine and break up the Roman power in its translated 
home. The Slaves poured into the Roman provinces 
of the East in nearly the same character in which 
the Teutons poured into the Roman provinces of the 
West. Like them, they came as half conquerors, half 
disciples. But the Slaves have kept up a distinct national 
being in the provinces of the East such as the Teutons 
never kept up in the provinces of the West. The Teu- 
ton abides in his old German and Scandinavian lands ; 
he abides in the other world of Britain; in the con- 
quered provinces of the Roman world he has been lost 
among the folk of the land ; he has at most contributed 
one element in the formation of new nations of mingled 
being. The Slave, largely displaced or assimilated by 
Teutonic advance in his own elder lands, has won for 
himself new homes within the Eastern provinces of 
Rome, within some of which he has himself assimilated 



432 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

new conquerors. We have already seen how the Serb, 
the purest Slave, abides side by side with the Bulgarian 
who has taken the name of alien conquerors whom he 
won over to his own national life. But the Slave has 
nowhere lost himself in the nationality either of the 
Greek or of the Roman ; nor is there in Eastern Eu- 
rope any nation of mingled national life, made up of 
mingled primitive, Greek, and Slavonic elements, as in 
Western Europe the French nation is made up of min- 
gled primitive, Roman, and Teutonic elements. Nor 
did any Slavonic prince ever take on himself as it were 
the very personality of the Roman power in the East in 
the way that a whole line of Teutonic princes took on 
themselves the personality of the Roman power in the 
West. Not a few Slavonic invaders seemed destined to 
enter the Imperial City as conquerors from without. 
Not a few dared to take among their own people the 
badges and titles of Imperial greatness. But to none of 
them was it granted to play in the New Rome the part 
which Alaric and Genseric had played within the Old. 
Still less was it granted to any Slavonic lord, not even 
to Bulgarian Simeon or Servian Stephen, to enter the 
New Rome as a welcome master. For none of them 
was it in store to receive the Eastern diadem beneath 
the cupola of Saint Sophia, at the hands of the Byz- 
antine patriarch, amid the rejoicing shouts of the Byz- 
antine people, as the Frankish Charles had received 
the Western diadem among the long colonnades of the 
old Saint Peter's, at the hands of the Pontiff of the 
Western Rome, amid the rejoicing shouts of those 
who still specially deemed themselves the Roman 
people. 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 433 

Thus, even within the Aryan and Christian fold, races 
have kept distinct in the Eastern lands in a way in which 
they have not kept distinct in the Western lands. The 
Roman Empire lived on while Slavonic invaders parted 
its provinces asunder; but there has never been a Holy 
Roman Empire of the Servian or Bulgarian Nation as there 
was within living memory a Holy Roman Empire of the 
German Nation. The main cause of this marked differ- 
ence between East and West seems to lie in the different 
positions which the Roman power held in its Eastern 
and in its Western provinces. The political conquest 
was equally thorough in both regions ; indeed the Greek 
nation came to identify itself with the Roman name and 
the Roman power, in a way that we cannot say that any 
people of the West ever did. Even the Frankish wear- 
ers of the Roman diadem did not keep on the same un- 
broken tradition of Roman power and Roman political 
being which was kept on by the Caesars of the East. But 
in the East there was not, there could not be, the same 
complete moral and intellectual conquest which Rome 
made in her Western provinces. To the Gaul and the 
Spaniard the Roman came, not only as a conqueror, but 
as a civilizer and a teacher. But wherever men were Greek 
either by birth or by adoption, whether in old Greece or 
in the lands which had put on a deeper or a slighter 
measure of Greek culture, Rome could have no such 
mission. The work of teaching and civilizing lay all on 
the other side. In the oft-quoted words of the Roman 
poet, it was captive Greece that led captive her con- 
queror. Throughout the Hellenic and hellenized lands, 
the Greek in a manner became Roman, and the Roman 
in a manner became Greek. In the end the Eastern- 



434 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

Roman power became nearly coextensive with the arti- 
ficially formed Greek nation. It became a power whose 
titles and political traditions were all Roman, while its 
culture, its speech, its literature, its theology, were all 
Greek. So it was in the end ; but for ages the Roman 
Empire of the East spoke with two tongues. While 
Greek was already the tongue of literature and of wor- 
ship, Latin was still the tongue of law and government 
and warfare. A power of a twofold nature like this 
could hardly take up the office of a teacher towards 
other nations in the same way in which the unroman- 
ized Greek would in the East or in which the unhellen- 
ized Roman could in the West. A Macedonian king at 
Antioch or Alexandria was the missionary of a culture 
distinctly Greek. A Roman Emperor at Trier or York 
was the missionary of a culture distinctly Roman. But 
a Roman Emperor at Constantinople had no errand quite 
so clearly to be understood. High and great was his 
calling ; he represented the power of Rome and the cul- 
ture of Greece ; he guarded Europe against the bar- 
barian, and Christendom against the Fire-worshipper 
and the Mussulman. But he did not represent any dis- 
tinct national or quasi-national life, like that artificial 
nationality of Rome in which the nations of the West 
were content to merge themselves. Here, it may be, is 
one great reason why the nations of South-eastern Eu- 
rope, both those who were in the land before the Roman 
came and those who came into the land after his coming, 
kept on every attribute of distinct national being in a 
way in which the nations of the West failed to keep 
theirs. 

That this was the case with the Slavonic immigrants 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 435 

was plain from the very beginnings of Slavonic settle- 
ment The Slaves, as a mass, never became either 
Greek or Roman. And that such was the case with the 
elder nations also became clear to the world about the 
end of the first millennium of our aera. Nearly seven 
hundred years had then passed since Byzantium, under 
its new names, had become the seat of the Roman 
power. It had been for a while one seat out of several, 
but the greatest and most abiding seat, the seat of the 
prince who ranked highest among two or more Impe- 
rial colleagues. While still only a division of the Em- 
pire, the Eastern half of the Roman dominion already 
began to put on a Greek look in the eyes of strangers. 
Our own Teutonic forefathers and kinsmen apply the 
Greek name to the Empire of Justinian and of the Em- 
perors before Justinian. But the great events of his 
reign, the recovery of Italy, Africa, and Southern Spain, 
put off for some ages all tendencies on the part of the 
Roman Empire of the East to develope in a Greek 
direction or in any direction but one strictly Roman. 
The one Roman Augustus, the present master of the 
New Rome, the absent master of the Old, again rules 
from Ocean to Euphrates. By the early years of the 
eighth century, the Empire has been cut short by the 
Lombard, the Saracen, and the Slave. Syria, Egypt, 
Africa, Southern Spain, Northern Italy, have passed 
away ; the dominion of the Roman Emperor in the Old 
Rome has dwindled to a name. On the Eastern borders 
the rivalry between Rome and Persia, between the vo- 
tary of Christ and the votary of Zoroaster, has given 
way to the far more fearful rivalry between Rome and 
the Saracen, between the votary of Christ and the votary 



436 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

of Mahomet. But what the Empire has lost in extent, 
it has gained in real strength. It gained again when, in 
the last year of the eighth century, Latin Italy formally 
fell away, when the Empire was parted asunder for ever, 
and when a Teutonic Augustus reigned over the Old 
Rome. Ever falling back, ever advancing, ever losing 
lands, ever winning them again, restored to much of its 
old extent and to far more of its old greatness, the Ro- 
man Empire of the East stood forth in the eleventh cen- 
tury as the greatest power of the civilized world. The 
Heraclian Emperors of the seventh century, the Isaurian 
Emperors of the eighth, had beaten back the Saracen 
from the walls of Constantinople, and had fixed Mount 
Tauros as a bulwark beyond which the misbeliever, 
though he might often harry, might never reign. The 
Macedonian Emperors won back lost realms in Kilikia, 
Syria, and Southern Italy ; they won new realms in Ar- 
menia ; they subdued the Bulgarian ; they beat back the 
Russian ; the spirit of the second Basil, like the spirit 
of the great Gustavus, lived on in those to whom he had 
taught the trade of victory ; of the conquests of each 
no small part was won when the conqueror was in his 
grave. 

Nothing could have been further from the thoughts 
of the great Emperors of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh 
centuries than that it was a Greek power that they were 
thus raising to the highest place on earth. Nor can we 
say with any truth that it was a Greek power that they 
did so raise. Still signs were not wanting that their 
Empire was fast putting on a Greek character. " Ro- 
man " was fast becoming the national name of the arti- 
ficial Greek nation ; " Romania " was fast becoming the 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 437 

territorial name of the land which that artificial nation 
occupied. It is at this period that we now begin to see 
the primitive races of the peninsula, so long merged to- 
gether under the common name of Romans, stand forth 
each with a distinct national being of its own. That is 
to say, as the Empire became silently identified with one 
of the nationalities within its range, the other national- 
ities, unconsciously it may be, but none the less effect- 
ually, began to assert their own position. In the elev- 
enth century the Albanian for the first time stands forth 
by that name, no name of his own choosing, but that by 
which other European nations have ever since thought 
good to call him. Ever since that time he has kept his 
place in history, and the end of his history has not come 
yet. 

A little earlier perhaps than the Albanians, we come 
across the first distinct appearance of the other primitive 
race of the peninsula, those whom other nations speak 
of as Vlachs or Wallachs, but who still keep to them- 
selves the special possession of the Roman name, as they 
alone among the South-eastern nations have adopted and 
kept the Roman tongue. Their existence best gives us 
the measure of direct Roman influences in the South- 
eastern lands. That they still speak a Latin tongue 
shows that there were people in the South-eastern lands 
who embraced the Roman speech, if not the Roman 
culture, as Gauls and Spaniards did in the West. But 
we see who they were who did so. They were those who 
lagged behind, those who had never received the tongue 
and culture of Greece. Where that tongue and culture 
had made their way, nothing Roman could displace 
them. Where they had not made their way, the field 



438 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

lay open for Rome. But the presence of the Greek 
tongue and culture hindered the Romance speech and 
Romance folk of the East from ever rising to the level 
of the Romance speech and Romance folk of the West. 
Greek-speaking Roman Emperors looked down on those 
of their subjects and neighbours who kept on the ac- 
quired tongue of Old Rome, just as they looked down 
on those of their subjects and neighbours who kept on 
the primitive speech of Illyria. In truth, within the 
South-eastern peninsula, the speech of Old Rome and 
the- speech of Illyria remained on much the same level. 
While the Greek went on adding to the written litera- 
ture of his tongue, while the Slave began the written 
literature of his tongue, the Albanian and the Rouman 
went on for ages without any written literature at all. 
The tongue of Old Rome sank, in the provinces beyond 
the Hadriatic, to the rank of an unwritten popular 
dialect. Men went forth from the dominions of the 
prince who still deemed himself Emperor of the Ro- 
mans to plant a more truly Roman speech, in some 
sense a more truly Roman nation, in barbarian lands 
beyond the Danube. 

Thus, in the course of the eleventh century, we may 
look on the Eastern Roman Empire as becoming prac- 
tically a Greek power, a power whose Greek character 
became strongly marked in opposition alike to the prim- 
itive races of the Illyrians and Roumans, and to the 
great immigrant race of the Slaves. In the course of 
that century too the Empire was first attacked by men 
of the two races which were presently to break it asun- 
der. The Norman of Apulia showed himself at one 
gate of the Empire as the forerunner of its Frankish and 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 



439 



Venetian conquerors. The Turk of the house of Sel- 
juk showed himself at its other gate as the forerunner 
of his more fearful kinsmen of the house of Othman. 
The Empire began to break in pieces. The great 
islands began to be the prey of Western lords; the 
inland regions of the great peninsula of Asia Minor 
passed away to Eastern lords ; the great Bulgarian re- 
volt, the great Rouman migration, had, before the end 
of the twelfth century, cut down the Empire to that 
dominion of coasts, islands, and peninsulas which, as 
I said long ago, so singularly reproduced the extent of 
the elder settlements of the Greek people. A Roman 
Empire which took in little that was not Greek, which 
no longer took in all that was Greek, began, not un- 
naturally, to seem in Western eyes as nothing more 
than a kingdom of Greece. 

Yet when, in the early years of the thirteenth century, 
the Roman Empire of the East was broken asunder for 
ever, when a prince from Flanders sat on the throne of 
Constantinople and a prince from Montferrat on the 
throne of Thessalonica, the territorial, if not the national 
title, which the East had borrowed from the West, still 
lived on. While Emperors of the Romans, Greek in 
speech, still kept on the Imperial name at Nikaia, in 
Epeiros, and at Trebizond, a prince of French speech 
bore in the Imperial city itself the territorial title of Em- 
peror of Romania. That Empire was not long-lived; 
the kingdom of Thessalonica was shorter-lived still. 
Greek princes, still Romans on their own lips, won back 
the new seat of kingship and the ancient seat of Empire. 
The revived Empire of the Palaiologoi kept on the titles 
and traditions of the old Eastern Roman Empire, and 



440 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

it remained for a while, in Europe at least, an advancing 
and conquering power. But it was still only one, though 
the chief, among many states, Greek, Frank, and Alba- 
nian, which arose out of the ruins of the Eastern Em- 
pire of Rome. Frank princes reigned in Cyprus, at 
Athens, in Achaia, at Naxos. The Sicilian kings and 
the Venetian commonwealth divided and disputed the 
possession of the Western coasts and islands. At last, 
in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Slave of the 
purer blood arose to shine for a moment as the chief 
power of the South-eastern world. The revived Bul- 
garian power was already waning ; but Stephen of Servia, 
Stephen Dushan, sprang to a might rivalling that of 
Simeon or Samuel. Bearing himself as Emperor of the 
Serbs and Greeks, the Slavonic conqueror ruled from 
the Danube to the Corinthian gulf. With the experience 
of five later ages, one is inclined to mourn that he was 
not fated to fix his throne in the New Rome. The vig- 
orous nationality of Servia, strengthened by the position 
and the traditions of the Imperial City, might perhaps 
have beaten back even that most fearful of invaders who 
now threatened alike Greek and Frank and Slave. A 
body with a head, a kingdom with a capital, might per- 
haps have withstood even the assault which was now 
in store. But the invader found a body without a head, 
a head without a body, a kingdom without a capital, 
and a capital without a kingdom — and all fell an easy 
prey. 

That invader was the last of all, the most terrible of 
all, he who still abides to witness to the permanence of 
even artificial races in the South-eastern lands. The 
Ottoman had already swallowed up nearly all Christian 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 441 

Asia ; before the Servian Emperor had passed away he 
had crossed into Europe also. Slowly but surely he ad- 
vanced, winning land after land, city after city. Never 
hurrying, making each land pass through the three stages 
of mere harrying, of tribute, of absolute incorporation 
with his dominion, within a hundred years from his 
entry, the Ottoman, in the shape of his greatest Sultan, 
of Mahomet the Conqueror, was fully lord of the South- 
eastern peninsula. There were still lands to gather in, 
but these were but as the gleaning after the vintage. 
The Imperial City, so long hemmed in, had at last fallen ; 
it had changed from the seat of Greek or Roman to the 
seat of Turkish power. The barbarian sat on the throne 
of the Caesars ; the infidel practised the rites of his Ara- 
bian creed beneath the spreading cupola of Justinian. 
The tale of Rome in the Eastern lands was over ; the 
mission of her long line of Emperors as guardians of 
Europe and of Christendom had passed to the city which 
had grown up under their shadow, to be first their enemy 
and then their heir. Venice, as we have already seen, 
with all her faults, had the glory of keeping, here a city, 
there an island, there a strip of coast, free from barba- 
rian bondage, under a rule which, if foreign, was at least 
civilized and Christian. And higher glory still belongs 
to that heroic remnant which kept up the fire of faith 
and freedom in the very darkest times. While Greek 
and Magyar were alike bondmen, while the Turk had 
his pashas reigning alike in Athens and in Buda, one 
small fragment of Servian race still kept on the memory 
of better days on the unconquered heights of the Black 

Mountain. 

With these exceptions, all the South-eastern nations 



442 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

passed under the yoke. It was a yoke of different de- 
grees of heaviness at different times and places; but 
even the most exceptionally favoured spots were tribu- 
tary to a foreign power, and through the great mass of 
the Greek and Slavonic lands the men of the land were 
the bondmen of the stranger on their own soil. On the 
whole, the yoke grew heavier as the ages passed on ; the 
rule of the earlier and greater Sultans was not more 
cruel than the rule of their weaker successors in modern 
times, and it was certainly far less corrupt. But " gov- 
ernment " it never was ; the rule of the Ottoman has 
been an organized brigandage of five hundred years. It 
has been only when the brigands had become weak as 
well as wicked that it became the fashion to flatter them 
with the titles of European royalty, to treat them as ad- 
mitted within the pale of European civilization, to bol- 
ster up and guarantee their tyranny as something which 
in some mysterious way conduced to the good of man- 
kind. Those Most Christian King^s who did not scruole 
to ally themselves with the infidel were in those days 
looked on as traitors. And no man then saw honour- 
able men, discharging an honourable calling, in those 
base souls who have sold themselves for barbarian srold, 
and who abase the wit of the Greek, the sword of the 
Englishman, to keep the infidel yoke tight down on the 
necks of their Christian brethren. And yet perhaps the 
ordinary diplomatic trade has more to answer for than 
the avowed traitors and hirelings. Every time a Turk 
is flattered, every time he is called " Majesty" or " High- 
ness " or " Excellency," every time the wolf is given 
credit for benevolent intentions towards the lamb, every 
time the " susceptibility " of the tormentor is alleged as 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 



443 



a reason for prolonging the bondage of those whom he 
torments, the reign of evil is, in a greater or less mea- 
sure, propped up and prolonged. 

But, from the later years of the seventeenth century on- 
wards, the range of oppression has, with some counter- 
workings, steadily lessened. Hungary and its annexed 
lands, Servia, Greece, Bulgaria — parts, that is of Greece 
and parts of Bulgaria — have been wrested from the fangs 
of the barbarian. Some of these lands have freed them- 
selves, some have been set free by friendly helpers ; 
some lands, when set free by friendly helpers, have been 
thrust back again into bondage by Western statesmen 
whose boast is that they can do mischief. While Bul- 
garia reveres the name of Alexander, while Thessaly 
reveres the name of Gladstone, the names of Beacons- 
field and Salisbury are cursed in the Macedonian homes 
which they condemned to a slavery the more cruel be- 
cause it came after a glimpse of freedom. The lands of 
the Greek, the Rouman, the Servian, have taken their 
place among the kingdoms of Europe ; free Tzernagora 
again stretches to her own sea ; but the lands where the 
first blow was struck for freedom seven years back, the 
lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, have been strangely 
handed over to an Austrian middleman, to be adminis- 
tered by him in the name of his master the Turk, and to 
be administered by him in such a sort as to make the 
rule of the master seem less hateful than the rule of the 
middleman. 

And now for a word as to the probable future of 
these nations. At the very beginning of these lectures 
I spoke of some points in their possible future as illus- 



444 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

trating some of the general principles which I began by 
laying down. I spoke of the possibility of a Greek dy- 
nasty reigning in Constantinople ; I spoke of the possi- 
bility of some kind of federal union of the various na- 
tions of South-eastern Europe. But I spoke of both 
merely as possible things, as things which some tenden- 
cies which are manifestly at work make not unlikely, 
and which therefore a wise statesman will not pooh-pooh 
as things which cannot possibly be. Still I said that " not 
unlikely" is the strongest thing that we can say for 
either of them. If I were called upon to map out these 
South-eastern lands, I must assign the New Rome to 
the people who most nearly represent its old Imperial 
masters. I must assign the seat of the Basils and the 
Constantines to the race which still speaks the tongue, 
and stills keeps on the traditions, of the Basils and the 
Constantines. That is, if I had to award the throne of 
Constantinople, I must give it to a Greek prince. But 
if things should of themselves turn out otherwise, if 
a successor of Simeon and Samuel should get the 
start of the successor of Basil and Constantine, that is, 
if Constantinople were to find itself Bulgarian before I 
could make it Greek, I should see in the event an " in- 
dication of Providence " which was not to be withstood. 
I am bound to the general cause of the independence of 
the South-eastern nations. I am not bound to any par- 
ticular form for that independence or to any particular 
means for bringing it about. I should always say, Do 
whatever is right at any particular moment, and let 
events shape themselves. If no blow is ever to be struck 
till we have a cut-and-dried scheme ready to meet every 
contingency, we shall never have any contingency to 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 445 

meet When William the Silent crossed the frontier on 
his errand of deliverance, he had not the articles of the 
Union of Utrecht, still less the articles of the Peace of 
Westfalia, ready written in his pocket. When Washing- 
ton took the command under the elm at Cambridge, he 
had not the Federal Constitution, or even the Declaration 
of Independence, ready wri f ten in his pocket. The few- 
brave men who seven years back first unsheathed their 
yataghans amid the hills of Herzegovina did not carry 
with them a scheme for an independent kingdom of 
Roumania, an independent principality of Servia, a trib- 
utary principality of Bulgaria, an autonomous province 
of Eastern Roumelia. They did not foresee Macedonia 
delivered and thrust back into bondage, Montenegro 
stretching to the sea at Antivari and Dulcigno, but 
bidden to give up Spizza to the big neighbours who 
had a fancy for it. They did not foresee Larissa with 
her freedom both promised and granted, and Joannina 
with her freedom twice promised but never granted. 
Their simple minds did not look forward to see Cy- 
prus pass in some mysterious way under British ad- 
ministration.; least of all did they dream that the fruit 
of their labours on the part of their own land would be 
to hand it over to the administration of their Imperial, 
Royal, and Apostolic neighbour, and that they would 
have to wage again the same warfare against him which 
they had so lately waged against the older enemy. They 
could foresee none of these things ; they simply struck 
a blow, and struck it at the right moment ; and if the 
Great Powers have not allowed all the good to come of 
it that might have come, the Great Powers have not 
been able to hinder a large amount of good from hap- 

29 



446 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

pening, or to hinder a large amount of evil from being 
swept away. And those other few brave men who lately- 
stood, who perhaps still stand, to defend their rights by 
the lovely mouths of Cattaro — they know not — we know 
not for them — what a day may bring forth. They may 
be trampled — they may already have been trampled — 
under foot by the overwhelming might of their faithless 
enemy. The odds are of a truth frightfully against them. 
Or it may be that the little cloud which has arisen on 
those hills may be like the little cloud which arose seven 
years back on the hills a little further inland. It may 
swell step by step into a mighty storm which may cut 
short the fabric of evil which has its twofold — its " dual " 
— centre at Pest and at Vienna, as the fabric of evil which 
has its centre at Constantinople has been cut short al- 
ready. The odds against the men of the Bocche are yet 
more frightful than were the odds against the men of 
Herzegovina ; they are perhaps not more frightful than 
the odds were more than once against William the Si- 
lent; and it may be an omen that, if we search our tables 
of genealogy, we shall find that Philip of Spain had some 
grandmothers in common with Francis Joseph. Through 
all these lands the chances are doubtful, because the con- 
tending forces are many. The forces of the South-east- 
ern nations, if united, if left to themselves, could, we may 
believe, easily drive the Turk out of Europe ; certainly 
they could easily pen him up in the Imperial City. But 
will those forces be united ? Can Greek and Bulgarian 
so forget the jealousies of a thousand years as to act 
together against the common enemy ? Will the Great 
Powers allow them to act singly or together ? Or again, 
it may be that Constantinople, the possession which has 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 447 

twice prolonged the life of powers which must otherwise 
have passed away, whose walls so long sheltered the 
Frank against the Greek and the Greek against the 
Turk, may again enable the decaying Turk to prolong 
his being, after Europe, and even Asia, has passed away 
from him. Or yet again, it may be that the Ottoman 
power may be threatened, not only by Christian, but by 
Mussulman enemies. Can Christian and Mussulman 
unite in such a cause? Very recent events perhaps 
may show that such an union is possible. At this mo- 
ment Christian and Mussulman warriors, both of Sla- 
vonic blood, united by the old rite of Slavonic brother- 
hood, are fighting side by side against the Austrian. It 
may be therefore that the Christians and Mussulmans of 
other races may be able to make common cause against 
the Ottoman enemy of both. Or are things to go back 
to the days when the New Rome had to fight for her 
being, not against the Turk, the comparatively recent 
proselyte of Islam, but against the true countrymen and 
kinsfolk of the Arabian prophet ? It may be that the 
nations of South-eastern Europe and of the Christian 
fringe on the coast of Asia may have in the end to 
strive, not with the decaying Ottoman, but with the 
regenerate Saracen, marching forth as of old, not at the 
bidding of a Sultan of Brousa or Constantinople, but of 
a Caliph of Bagdad or Damascus. All these things may 
be ; some of them are not unlikely to be ; but we can- 
not say that any of them will be, any more than that any 
of them will not be. All that we can say is that the end 
is not yet. There are forces of great strength on the 
side of evil ; there are also forces of great strength on 
the side of good. Keeping within the bounds of Eu- 



448 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

rope, leaving as a distant possibility the chance of suc- 
cessful movements within the bosom of Islam itself, we 
may say that the cause of South-eastern freedom has 
three enemies to struggle with. There is the old enemy 
the Turk, the sick man truly, but not yet a dead man, 
one who, like his Roman predecessors, has sometimes 
a strange way of picking up renewed life when he seems 
to be at his last gasp. Then, worse than the Turk, are 
the selfish intrigues of the Great Powers of Europe, ever 
ready to make any free and small people their tool and 
catspaw, and to throw aside a weak ally when it is con- 
venient to win the favour of a strong one. Above all 
there is the ever-grasping, ever-stealthy, ambition of the 
Austrian house, despising no gain, however base, deeming 
no course shameful if it tends to the enlargement of the 
family estate. Lastly, more dangerous than all, because 
likely to be more lasting than all, there are the dissen- 
sions among the subject nations themselves. The Great 
Powers are indeed great forces, great forces for the most 
part on the side of evil, unless now and then, when, as 
twice within two years past, the strong will of a right- 
eous man is enabled to turn even the powers of evil to 
the ends of good. Yet it may be that there are forces 
even stronger than the great powers of Europe. Nations 
after all outlive powers, and the national life of the na- 
tions of South-eastern Europe is a very stubborn life in- 
deed. It may be that nations which have lived through 
the assaults of the Persian and the Saracen, through the 
rule of the Frank and the Turk, may show that they 
have more in them of the stuff that leads to success than 
can be found in the intriguing brain of Francis Joseph, 
even though he may be backed by the mightier hand of 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 449 

Bismarck behind. But if this is to be, it can only be by 
the union of all the nations whose interest and duty it is 
to get rid of the common enemy. If South-eastern Eu- 
rope only were as Italy, the intrigues of Francis Joseph 
against its union and independence might be as easily 
shattered as were the intrigues of Louis-Napoleon 
Buonaparte against the union and independence of 
Italy. But unhappily South-eastern Europe is not 
as Italy ; the gap, wide as it is, which parts the man of 
Piedmont from the man of Calabria, is not so wide as the 
gap which parts the Greek, the Albanian, the Rouman, 
the Servian, and the Bulgarian, each of them from all 
his immediate neighbours. Here is the great difficulty 
of all. It is a greater difficulty than any of the others, 
because it does not depend on causes which may be 
momentary, like the intrigues or the ambition of this or 
that man or of this or that power, but is inherent in the 
nature of the case. I can only say once more, Look to 
the lessons of experience. It was by the disunion of 
the* nations of South-eastern Europe that the Turk first 
made his way in ; it is by the union of the nations of 
South-eastern Europe that he must be driven out. 

Among so many and so great contending forces, it 
would be indeed rash to foretell anything. But the un- 
practical man, the sentimental man, that is the man who 
looks both behind him and before him and who takes 
reason and experience as his guides in looking both 
ways, has some advantages over the so-called practical 
man, say the diplomatist or the clever journalist, whose 
practical wisdom commonly consists in refusing to look 
further either way than the length of his own nose. 
Whatever happens, the practical man is sure to be sur- 



450 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

prised ; for of all the ways in which things may turn 
out, the. way in which he expects them to turn out is 
always the one which is the least likely of all. It must 
be so ; for he refuses to listen to reason and experience ; 
he refuses to take in either the facts of the particular 
case in hand or the general facts of man's nature. 
Seven years ago practical men thought that they, or 
the Turk at their bidding, could at once put down the 
revolt of Herzegovina. A few months later they were 
driven to put on record that the war, " contrary to ex- 
pectation," had lasted through the winter. But at all 
events, so the wise men told us, the area of war would 
not be extended. But presently it was extended ; not- 
withstanding the soothsayings of the wise men, first the 
Servian and the Montenegrin, then the Russian, stepped 
in to extend it. But, at all events, so the wise men 
said, the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Em- 
pire will remain untouched ; even a tributary province, 
the oracle told us with all solemnity, lay " beyond the 
range of practical politics." But the range of practical 
politics was presently widened. The impossible tribu- 
tary province is there, and alongside of it are things yet 
more impossible in the shape of two independent king- 
doms, while the integrity of the Ottoman Empire has 
been further cut short by the advance of free Montene- 
gro, of liberated Greece and Servia, and it is now fur- 
ther threatened by the Austrian middleman himself. And 
when we remember that the things which the practical 
men said never could happen are many of them just the 
things which the sentimental men wished to happen, and 
some of which they thought not unlikely to happen, the 
sentimental people may perhaps be excused for doubt- 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 45 I 

ing whether the practical people are, after all, so much 
wiser than themselves. At least to those who take ex- 
perience for their guide, the past is not without good 
hopes for the future. I have seen somewhat in my own 
life-time, and I have seen some little of it with my own 
eyes. When I was born, Italy was bowed down under 
the yoke of foreign and domestic tyrants ; Greece was 
fighting for her being against her barbarian oppressor. 
I may say, almost without a figure, that the last echoes 
of the cannon of Navarino were the first sounds from the 
great world of present history which fell on my childish 
ears. I cannot actually remember that great day; I 
was too young for that ; but I can remember when the 
memory of the fight which three European powers 
waged for Europe against the barbarian, which three 
Christian powers waged for Christendom against the 
infidel, were still matters of comparatively recent men- 
tion on men's mouths. Since those days free Greece 
has again taken her place among the nations ; she has 
twice extended her borders, once by the gift of England, 
a second time by the untiring energy of England's cho- 
sen leader. And I, who never saw her in her bondage, 
have seen her in her freedom. The English poet who 
died in the cause of Greece sang in her days of bondage : 

" The mountains look on Marathon, 

And Marathon looks on the sea; 
And musing there an hour alone, 

I dreamed that Greece might yet be free. 
For, standing on the Persian's grave, 
I could not deem myself a slave." 

The dreams of that day have become the truths of 
ours. I too have stood on the mound of Marathon; 



452 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

but it was not to dream that Greece might be free at 
some distant day, but to rejoice that it was again a free 
land on which I stood. I stood there to muse, not only 
on the old deliverance from the Persian, but on the later 
deliverance which when Byron sang was still a thing 
of the future. He who now stands on the mound of 
Marathon should remember that the plain on which he 
looks has twice played its part in the struggle for Hel- 
lenic freedom. He should remember that the grave of 
the Persian has been also the grave of the Turk — that 
if Miltiades won deathless fame by the earlier victory 
of freedom, some roses too may be spared for the less 
famous name of Gouras, who fought and vanquished on 
that same ground for Athens and for Greece no less 
than he. The same poet sang again how 

"A king sat on the rocky brow 

That looks on sea-born Salamis." 

And I have looked on sea-born Salamis from another 
brow, fast by the home of one greater than kings. It is 
something to have sat beneath the roof of Constantine 
Kanares, to have seen and spoken with the last of the 
heroes, to have touched the hand that lighted the fire- 
ships, the hand that steered his little boat through the 
barbarian fire, to have listened to the voice that had 
shouted in barbarian ears the old war-cry of New Rome, 
the war-cry of Victory to the Cross. And it was some- 
thing too to stand on the Athenian akropolis, on the 
highest point of the fallen temple of so many creeds, to 
hear from below the sound of a gathering multitude, to 
see the people of Athens gathering round the palace of 
their king, and to learn that what the voice of the people 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 453 

called for was that, in the hour of need, personal and 
party jealousies should be cast aside, and that the hero of 
Greece should again be set to steer the bark of her des- 
tiny. Since then the last relic of a mightier time has gone 
to his rest ; but we may still hope that when the day of 
trial comes, the race of Kanares, the race of Botzares, will 
be found to be not wholly dead. And in other lands of 
that wide peninsula the line of the old heroes beyond all 
doubt lives and thrives. If we can no longer sing how 

" On Souli's rock and Parga's shore 
Exist the remnant of the line 
Such as the Doric mothers bore," 

yet on the heights of Tzernagora, amid the rocks of 
Herzegovina, beside the inland sea of Cattaro, the Slave 
has ready stout hearts and strong right hands for whom 
we may trust that Greece too, in her hour of need, may 
again find worthy yoke-fellows. Seven years they went 
forth, as in the war-song of the earliest of Crusaders, 
"with the praises of God in their mouths and a two- 
edged sword in their hands, to be avenged of the heathen 
and to rebuke the people." And now Greece free and 
enlarged, Montenegro again stretching to her own sea, 
Servia free and enlarged, united Roumania placing a 
royal crown on her prince's brow, two Bulgarias in only 
nominal subjection to the oppressor who still works his 
will upon the third,— all these are changes, changes every 
one of them done in my day and in the day of much 
younger men than I. And all that has been won makes 
us only look on to what has still to be won. We need 
no longer cry, as we cried six years back, 

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Balkan mountains cold." 



454 PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

The doers of the deed of Batak have been slain and 
banished by one another's hands. But for the land 
where Lord Salisbury rejoiced over all the Christian 
flesh that he had handed over to pagan teeth, every 
Christian may still hear the voice of old, " Come over 
into Macedonia and help us." And in the heart and 
centre, the roof and crown of all, the barbarian still de- 
files the throne of the Caesars, the infidel still profanes 
the most glorious of Christian temples. There in the 
New Rome, in the city of Constantine, the mournful 
psalm may still, after four hundred years, be sung, " O 
God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance ; thy 
holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an 
heap of stones." Four years back, a Christian army, an 
Orthodox army, stood in arms within sight of Saint 
Sophia, and, at the bidding of military discipline, 
marched back to their homes. The next Christian 
and Orthodox host that marches in their path may 
lie under no such hard necessity. To me, to speak 
once more of mine own self, the Old Rome is now 
familiar ground. But I never saw it till it was set free 
from the yoke of the priest and the stranger. And I have 
never found it in my heart to make my way to the New 
Rome, bowed down as it still is beneath the yet heavier 
yoke of the barbarian and the infidel. Yet I have seen 
so many changes that I dare to hope that, without reach- 
ing any patriarchal age, I may live to see other changes 
which may enable me to tread the Rome of Constantine 
as well as the Rome of Romulus, without seeing matter 
for sorrow at every step. I should indeed be able to 
sing my Nunc dimittis should I ever live to see a Chris- 
tian prince enthroned on the seat of Leo the Isaurian and 



ROME TRANSPLANTED. 455 

Basil the Bulgarian-slayer, should I ever live to see the 
church of the Divine Wisdom swept clear of its defile- 
ment, with the mosaics of its spreading cupola blazing 
again like Ravenna and Palermo, and the incense of 
Christian worship going up once more at the crowning 
and anointing of the first of a new line of Christian Em- 
perors. 



THE END. 



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